A book that deserves wide circulation and consideration but that is likely to be drowned out in all the conspiratorial noise.
People believe the darndest things—and, in the post-factual age, the thinking is getting weirder by the minute.
Confront a birther or a truther, and you’re likely to turn up stranger beliefs still about such things as the Illuminati, the killers of John F. Kennedy, George Soros, and “almost anything having to do with Hillary Clinton.” Such parcels of illogic aren’t strictly new, of course. As Konda (Emeritus, Political Science/SUNY Plattsburgh) chronicles, they date at least to the rise of the Freemasons (“the visibility of lodges added a stridency to conspiratorial rhetoric, similar to conspiracists today who rail against the ‘sheeple’ who cannot see the obvious”), and they hold in common a strong element of anti-Semitism and xenophobia as well as the paranoiac certainty that all one holds near and dear is in immediate danger. Yet, argues the author, conspiracy theory is now the coin of the realm, with what he calls conspiracism “the belief system of the twenty-first century.” That belief system is a congeries of random claims—e.g., the government is hiding the truth about UFOs; Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a sizable number of American Muslims are sworn to attack America; Franklin Roosevelt knew all about Pearl Harbor long before the fact; climate change is a hoax; and so on. But as the author shows, various echo chambers amplify and extend the reach of what was formerly patent craziness. For example, he writes, “the alt-right has brought what had originally been a marginal neo-Nazi conspiracy theory to the strongest position it has ever held," now perilously near to mainstream thought. Konda’s prose is sometimes drearily academic, but the theories he weighs and finds wanting are fascinating in their perversity, from chemtrails to climate change deniers.
A book that deserves wide circulation and consideration but that is likely to be drowned out in all the conspiratorial noise.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-226-58576-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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