Heavy-handed enough at times to make readers wish someone out there might step up to Buchanan’s defense; nonetheless,...
An oddly entertaining study of “the first plodding-to-the-top president,” a man mercifully forgotten by history.
James Buchanan (1791-1868) was a Pennsylvanian, writes Strauss (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Daddy’s Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters, and Sports, 2011), the log cabin of his birth now enshrined on a rural campus in Mercersburg. Yet, having survived the turmoil of the collapse of the Whig and Federalist factions, he cast his lot with the Southern Democrats. As president—a job for which he had prepared well if unimaginatively, plodding from one political post to another—he meddled in the Supreme Court decision in the matter of runaway slave Dred Scott, setting the Civil War in motion. Buchanan wasn’t on hand for the bloodletting, but he took time to write his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to ask for the return of some books he’d left behind at the White House. He may have had good intentions, but fueled by a diet of reading about Napoleon and exhibiting a combination of “hubris…arrogance, misaligned affections, indecisiveness, and misreading of current events,” Buchanan managed to trash pretty much whatever he touched. Does that make the self-styled “strict constructionist” the worst president in American history? Yes, by Strauss’ account; he was feckless and not interested in being guided toward doing a good job, he surrounded himself with yes men, and, lacking good counsel and left to his own devices, “he would often waffle on major issues, and could easily come up on the most ill-advised side of them.” Its juvenile title aside, and even allowing for a couple of positives for its subject, Strauss’ biography makes a convincing case for disdaining Buchanan, who, he writes in a concluding survey, has only two real rivals, both also forgotten: Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce.
Heavy-handed enough at times to make readers wish someone out there might step up to Buchanan’s defense; nonetheless, Strauss makes a firm argument for the essential doofusness of the 15th president.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4930-2483-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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