Perfect for political junkies with an abiding interest in liberalism.
A history professor finds a clue to what happened to the Democratic Party (and what might become of it) in the careers of two influential political consultants.
The U.S. hasn’t had the chance to deliver its verdict yet, but for the left in some parts of the world, this has been a pretty good year. Voters in the U.K., France, and Mexico handed electoral victories to liberal and center-left politicians, which U.S. Democrats might count as good news if they weren’t so worried about what might happen here in November. In his new book, Shenk refrains from predicting who might win the next U.S. election, but he does offer some context about how the Democratic Party (and its center-left counterparts in the U.K., Israel, and South Africa) came to be what it is today and what it might become. Shenk tells the story of the party through two influential political strategists, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen, bitter enemies whose ideas, he writes, “provided guideposts for the careers that followed, shaping campaigns in the United States and across the globe.” Both men’s careers evolved as the Democratic Party was transformed from one dominated by the working class into what it is today: a party that, in Shenk’s words, “owes more to universities than to unions…an alliance between the most educated and the most oppressed, where the virtues of diversity are obvious but solidarity is harder to come by.” Future Democratic victories, he writes, won’t be possible “without restoring the party’s connection to a broad swathe of the working- and middle-class.” Shenk’s account of Greenberg and Schoen is fascinating but will likely appeal most to readers with a taste for the inside-baseball of U.S. politics. Anyone on the American left, though, will find a wise analysis on the past, present, and future of liberalism here.
Perfect for political junkies with an abiding interest in liberalism.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798987053669
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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