Hundreds of voices resound in this thoroughgoing analysis of '60s radicalism. ``If people demonstrate in a manner to interfere with others, they should be rounded up and put in a detention camp,'' argues Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst in 1972. Abbie Hoffman, speaking shortly before his suicide in 1989, gleefully proclaims, ``We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong—and we were right. I regret nothing!'' Novelist Philip Caputo recalls that in his worldview John F. Kennedy was a modern King Arthur, the officers of the Army his knights, and Vietnam the new Crusade. Rock lyrics, SDS slogans, and official pronouncements from the likes of Spiro Agnew, Richard Daley, and George Wallace also abound. But Anderson (History/Texas A&M Univ.; The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, not reviewed) brings order to the period's chaos in his rigorous account of the intellectual origins of modern dissent, tracing the baby-boom generation's involvement with the civil-rights and free-speech movements as the proving ground for what, after the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, would very nearly become civil war. The author skewers a system that sent so many impoverished minority youngsters to Southeast Asia (``of the 30,000 male graduates from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT in the decade following 1962, only 20 died in Vietnam'') and condemns a national ethos that idolized Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun while imprisoning conscientious objectors. Clearly, for him the '60s are very much alive, and his passionate remembrance galvanizes the book. However, it suffers from occasional but annoying errors. Anderson misdates songs and truncates and mistransposes lyrics; he implies that musicians Mama Cass Elliot and Keith Moon died of drug overdoses (in fact, both suffered heart attacks); he places Fort Bliss (Texas) in New Jersey. Despite these lapses, a highly accessible survey that should be the standard for years to come.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-507409-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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