A sweeping, busy examination of the necessary, however fraught rewriting of America’s social contract.
Jampacked survey of the social movements since the 1960s that compelled America to become a more inclusive society—and created a potent conservative backlash.
Self (History/Brown Univ.; American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, 2003) dives into the maelstrom of social revolution in the mid-1960s, which exploded assumptions about manhood, womanhood, sex, race and family. Those leading the revolution had to grapple with high unemployment and disenfranchisement of black males in the poor urban communities, and the bemoaning of the “psychological castration” of the black male and “victimization” of the working-class white male was promoted by voices as different as Malcolm X, Sen. Patrick Moynihan, Stokely Carmichael and Pete Hamill. Norms of manhood such as soldiering and patriotism were shaken by anti-war activists and draft resisters, while homosexuals demanded equal rights and an end to forced secrecy. The ideal of female domesticity fractured as women pressed for economic equality, child care, access to reproductive services and safe abortion. Yet as the counterculture, feminist and gay movements began to find their political footing, the conservative right wing galvanized its forces in the form of Nixon’s “silent majority,” middle Americans, anti-feminists, right-to-life advocates and evangelicals who all decried the breakdown of the nuclear family, boosting the Republican Party and giving rise to the Reagan Revolution of 1980. Conservatives successfully recast counterculture liberalism as damaging to the nation and the welfare-entitlement state as anathema to natural laissez-faire market principles. In a too-brief epilogue to his exhaustive study, Self sums up how this state of affairs prevailed at least through the “culture wars” of the 1990s.
A sweeping, busy examination of the necessary, however fraught rewriting of America’s social contract.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9502-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
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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