A timely and highly useful book in this semiquincentennial year—and far beyond.
A fresh reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Drafted by Thomas Jefferson but edited by committee, the Declaration of Independence is regarded today as a timeless, sacred document. By historian Parkinson’s lights, however, it was “born out of emergency, crisis, and fear.” Whereas today we remember the Declaration mostly for its sonorous opening, Parkinson reads it for the 27 specific grievances against the British Crown and, especially, King George III, who was cast as a usurper and tyrant in contrast to the revolutionaries’ insistence that they were following the best traditions of British liberty—and therefore needed to craft a “statement of purpose” that was both detailed and emphatic. It is within those grievances, Parkinson holds, that the ideas driving the American Revolution can best be found, and if they seem somewhat abstract today, he adds, those grievances truly identified the “tyrants and rogues” of his title. He proceeds to explore the grievances, devoting whole chapters to some and clustering others. Several, he notes, have to do with the king’s vetoing laws of what Jefferson called “the most salutary tendency” and other acts of interfering with colonial legislatures, including simply ignoring laws that were sent for his authorization. Central to the revolutionaries’ argument was representation, meaning not just a presence in Parliament but also adequate legislative seats to accommodate the westward expansion of the colonies, which George had tried to block “in order to keep the peace in North America.” Parkinson notes that Black and Indigenous peoples are present, if not always mentioned by name, in several of the grievances and that Jefferson, for all the hypocrisy, both condemned slavery outright and attempted to blame the king for the institution—charges that were softened, Jefferson later recalled, at the insistence of “Southern Gentlemen whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence of that traffic.”
A timely and highly useful book in this semiquincentennial year—and far beyond.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781324124542
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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