Sure to elicit controversy, this is a worthwhile addition to a volatile, necessary discussion.
Startling insider’s account of how the firearms industry struck a Faustian bargain with extremism for profit.
With some anguish but also precision and wit, Busse fuses business history with memoir in this unsparing examination of American gun culture’s devolution. “I am responsible for selling millions of guns…[yet] I detested everything about the Trump-driven boom, which meant that my entire livelihood was a contradiction,” he writes. The author is aware of how the role of firearms in society has mutated, starting with its importance to rural life, central to his childhood on a Kansas ranch. The scrappy camaraderie of the industry seemed appealing when he joined Kimber, a struggling company focused on high-end pistols, but his enthusiasm waned as the industry embraced the AR-15 rifle and post–9/11 conspiracy theories (alongside rising sales). Busse emphasizes how legal and social codes regarding gun ownership have eroded in the era of mass shootings and open carry aggressiveness. This process accelerated in the 1990s in response to the Brady Bill, assault weapons ban, and market fluctuations, which showed gun executives that weapons sales could be amplified in response to politics. Busse positions the National Rifle Association as central to this, developing their now-familiar political strategy of ideological purity, while “no industry professional wanted to believe that the main driver of our business was anything but genius.” He terms the gradual result “a powerful political machine radicalizing our nation.” For years, the author was a lonely voice in a tightknit industry: “I thought I could keep the industry from changing, and then I spent years fighting to hold a battle line within it.” Busse portrays his years in the industry lucidly, and his anger regarding its wrong turns and destructive influence seems genuine. “Our country had arrived at the point where military guns were the symbols of an entire political movement,” he writes.
Sure to elicit controversy, this is a worthwhile addition to a volatile, necessary discussion.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6873-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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