A meticulously researched, thought-provoking look at the mechanics of American politics.
Haynes presents a detailed account of the U.S. presidential nominating conventions and candidates from 1904-1944, with a particular emphasis on the Roosevelts.
The author, a former trial attorney, opens with the event that would change American politics “forever”: William McKinley’s assassination and the subsequent swearing in of Theodore Roosevelt as the country’s 26th president. From there, chapters exhaustively cover the intrigues and anecdotes from every subsequent nominating convention over a 40-year period. Lyrics to campaign songs introduce the sections, including gems like “Herbert Hoover promised us two chickens in each pot, / But breadlines and Depression were the only things we got.” The author discusses nominees for each party, as well as the sometimes dubious methods by which they were chosen—Franklin Roosevelt, for example, received swift backlash for trying to secretly change the two-thirds rule for the 1932 nomination, while Wendell Willkie, an active Democrat, managed to win the Republican nomination in 1940. Haynes also dives into the various social issues that affected each nomination process (such as the women’s suffrage movement and the voting rights of Blacks) and provides facts about the voting process itself. The book provides a truly astonishing amount of detail about the people, events, and settings for each convention, as evidenced by this description of Philadelphia’s Convention Hall (home to the 1940 Republican convention): “The arena, exposed to the sun during daytime, had a modest air conditioning system, but that provided little relief from outside temperatures that rose to ninety degrees on most days that the convention met, especially with more than 16,000 people packed inside. One observer called it ‘a filthy, sweaty hell of sealed-in heat.’” Some of these details may appeal to only the most hardcore history buffs, especially when delivered by the author’s largely dry narrative voice. But many of the anecdotes, like one describing alcohol flowing “freely for conventioneers” six months into Prohibition, paint a fascinating portrait of the time.
A meticulously researched, thought-provoking look at the mechanics of American politics.Pub Date: March 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781737766957
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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