An absorbing look at the first American presidency, in which Washington emerges not as the familiar George Stuart icon but as a fallible human being—one whose personal qualities nonetheless made him the quintessentially great man of American history. In focusing on the prosaic facts of Washington's presidency rather than on his better-known, and more heroic, Revolutionary War career, Smith (The Harvard Century, 1986, etc.) shows that the first President was not only the admirably self-sacrificing Cincinnatus of legend but a politically judicious statesman as well. The challenges facing the new President in 1790 (when Smith begins his account) were enormous: The young country lacked military power and political traditions, and it was financially impoverished, riven by ideological and sectional rancor (epitomized by the enmity between Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasure Alexander Hamilton), and beset by hostile European powers and Indian tribes. Under these circumstances, Washington had to invent the Presidency, restore the nation's credit, and give the republic a measure of respect at home and abroad—all while avoiding involvement in Europe's turbulent politics. Although the first President, aided by vigorous and brilliant associates like Jefferson and Hamilton, succeeded in achieving these goals, his true greatness, Smith shows, lay in his resistance to the insidious enticements of power: ``By voluntarily relinquishing office at the end of two terms, Washington forced a world more accustomed to Caesar than Cincinnatus to revise its definition of greatness.'' Washington emerges here as vain, often humorless, and painfully reserved, but Smith demonstrates that this leader's qualities of wisdom and self-restraint helped give the new nation an enduring tradition of democratic government. A fine, highly readable, and nicely balanced account.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-52442-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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