Valuable data for those seeking electoral reform in the age of hanging chads, gerrymandered districts and absent absentees.
Still upset by the events of 2000 and 2004? It won’t cheer you to learn from this wide-ranging book that election-rigging is a time-honored American institution.
Political historian Campbell (Short of the Glory, 1998) admits to having been dismayed at the results of the 2000 presidential election. Yet, she writes, it was strange solace to know “that the process itself was deeply corrupted and had been so for over two hundred years.” The corruption she charts is satisfyingly varied in terms of both geography and levels of wrongdoing, from George Washington’s practice of buying votes to Boss Tweed and Richard Daley’s absolutist control over the ballot boxes of New York and Chicago to the dirty tricks of the Nixon era and beyond. Sometimes the corruption is of a forgivable nature, as when absentee ballots cast by Civil War soldiers were ignored lest they give the Union presidency to a Democratic peace candidate; other times it is simply sleazy, as when the president of the country’s leading manufacturer of voting machines promised to deliver the vote to Dubya lest the presidency go to a Democratic peace candidate. It is cold comfort to know that the sleaziest and most corrupt districts in the country lie in the South, and that they’ve been that way forever; Florida and Louisiana, it seems, can always be counted on to miscount the vote, and there’s even a verb among political insiders, “to plaquemine,” that honors (or dishonors) ever-corrupt Plaquemines Parish outside New Orleans. But there are plenty of Northern sinners, too, and Campbell does an evenhanded job of chronicling such things as the near-theft of the Wisconsin governorship in 1856—thwarted by a state Supreme Court that “displayed how an independent judiciary can play a vital constitutional role in overseeing contested elections”—and the curiosities of Ohio (and, for good measure, Ukraine) in 2004.
Valuable data for those seeking electoral reform in the age of hanging chads, gerrymandered districts and absent absentees.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1591-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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