—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
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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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