Imperfect, then, but quite interesting: much like some of those very presidents.
Do presidents control the government, or does the government control presidents?
In the old days, it was supposed, America’s leaders were men of the people, representing the people, interested in the welfare of the people; as if by design, they were ipso facto morally superior to the crowned kings and queens of the old country (though, of course, Sydney Smith’s query of 1820 still holds: “Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave?”). But by the end of the 20th century, writes Graubard (History Emeritus/Brown Univ.; Mr. Bush’s War, 1992, etc.), things had changed; for a century, America’s rulers “were monarchs, admittedly of a new breed, increasingly attended by courtiers” and given to waging war constantly, all over the world, in order to maintain the Empire. It’s a lively and promising conceit, but Graubard undermines it by starting off with the essentially decent Theodore Roosevelt, who showed admirable restraint while glowering and talking of big sticks: “ . . . whatever his admiration for military and naval power,” says Graubard, “they never led him into foreign wars.” His thesis is worn away, too, by all the nagging questions the reader is likely to form along what is, after all, a very long way: Was H.R. Haldeman really more of a courtier than Alexander Hamilton? Was Jimmy Carter really as bad as all that? (Yes, Graubard answers, he really was. But Al Haig was even worse.) What’s more terrible, getting caught in a lie or getting caught in a blunder? And so on. Still, Graubard’s portraits of 20th-century presidents are useful in a college-survey sort of way, and they lead him to a quite wonderful fire-and-brimstone denunciation of the current administration, which is all about power, secrecy, and deception, staffed by “men and women, courtiers and mock warriors, [who] served a monarch whose authority rested on a contested election, who acted as if the nation had invested him with exceptional powers.”
Imperfect, then, but quite interesting: much like some of those very presidents.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-465-02757-1
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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