A superficial and unconvincing account that does little to inform readers of the dangers of political reciprocity.
A British journalist examines the long, troubled romance between Hollywood and America’s political capital.
Stanley (The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, 2012, etc.) probably meant well with this name-dropping argument that glamorous movie star activism is the key to understanding arcane Washington, D.C., politics. Unfortunately, this poorly sourced, facetious narrative is more indicative of the author’s politics than the nation’s. You have to give him credit for coverage, in that he goes all the way back to old-school Hollywood to examine how moguls like Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers traded popularity for political gain. From there, Stanley resurrects the well-worn stories of the Rat Pack’s support of John F. Kennedy and the plethora of celebrities who supported Sen. George McGovern’s spectacularly unsuccessful bid to defeat Richard Nixon, as well as a glancing blow at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure as governor of California: “If only life was more like the movies,” the author writes, summarizing California’s monetary woes. However, most of the book tends to skew toward modern political movements, largely focused on President Barack Obama. In the opening chapter, the author poses the candidate as Batman versus a Mitt Romney as the villain Bane, and he includes an introductory dissection of the infamous “empty chair” incident instigated by that rare celebrity conservative Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention, which lends itself to a discussion later on of the cowboy mythology popularized by Ronald Reagan and others. Criticisms of TV shows like The West Wing (an idealized liberal White House) and Modern Family (Hollywood’s so-called gay agenda) come off even more poorly than their celebrity-studded film counterparts. Elsewhere, Stanley shoehorns in references to franchises like Twilight and Harry Potter with little political relevance.
A superficial and unconvincing account that does little to inform readers of the dangers of political reciprocity.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03249-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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