—Gregory McNamee
Ash Tuesday (***UPFRONT EDITORIAL***)
Where were you on September 11, 2001? American children will someday ask that question, as their great-great-grandparents once asked after their contemporaries’ whereabouts on December 7, 1941; their great-grandparents, November 22, 1963; their grandparents, December 8, 1980. The world may or may not have changed on 9/11, but countless individual lives did. So, too, did the way many Americans view themselves and the larger world. Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and the late, lamented Brill’s Content, considers that transformation in a book that is extraordinary in its breadth and scope, especially given how recent the events under discussion are. In After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era (Simon & Schuster; April 7, 2003; $29.95; 732 pp.; 0-7432-3709-9), he assembles a cast of 50 in order to examine a political and social landscape dusted with the ashes of New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Many are ordinary folk: the owner of a shoe-repair shop two blocks from Ground Zero, the widow of a firefighter lost in the collapse of the Twin Towers, a defense-industry executive who watched as the Pentagon burned. Others are the generals and soldiers of the security state that arose after 9/11, from homeland-defense czar Tom Ridge to the frontline Customs and Border Patrol agents charged with sealing a nation through whose portals, on the day before the terrorist attacks, 760,000 citizens and 900,000 foreigners had entered. Then there are the lawyers, gathered to fight in the name of an array of special interests: lawyers for and against the underwriters of airlines and office buildings; lawyers for and against bereaved families; lawyers for and against John Lindh, the American Taliban. In the deep background of Brill’s narrative stand a population whose attention had previously been fixed on Gary Condit and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, seemingly unaware that a larger world existed at all, and a president “for whom gravitas seemed to be more a challenging vocabulary word than a defining trait.” In this immense dramatis personae, their actions tracked day by day, Brill locates angels, those who rose above self-interest to serve the common good. He points to ways in which, thanks to their efforts, things have changed for the better—airport security, for instance, a system that hitherto “wasn't a system at all.” But he finds devils as well, busily seeking financial and political gain in the misery of others. Angel and devil wear the same clothes and speak the same language, and the reader must decide which is which throughout this long narrative. “We need to remember where we were on that morning,” Brill writes in closing. So we do, and he’ll help fix our memory, our disgust, and our resolve.
—Gregory McNameePub Date: April 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3709-9
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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