A book remarkable for its depth, breadth, and intellectual daring.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian examines the fanatical secular religion of American exceptionalism and why it is leading government officials and the electorate astray in an increasingly violent world.
McDougall (History and International Relations/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1820-1877, 2008 etc.) opens with the errors of the George W. Bush presidency based on American civil religion and closes with the errors of the Barack Obama presidency based on nearly identical misguided thinking. In between, he produces a mostly chronological tour de force highlighting the eras of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. During the 1950s and ’60s, Kennedy's Catholic faith certainly generated controversy, but McDougall is more interested in the young president's invocation of civil religion to justify his democracy's manifest destiny. At his inauguration, Kennedy stated that human rights derived not from compassionate governments but rather from the power of God. As a result, on God's Earth, the United States of America was required to further God's plan of individual freedom across national borders. Later in this impressive multicentury survey, McDougall demonstrates how both of Obama's inaugural ceremonies carried the American civil religion to a more pronounced zealotry in the fevered post–9/11 atmosphere. McDougall writes with admirable passion, but he never forgets to ground that passion in rigorous scholarship. Perhaps the only flaw—if it is, indeed, a flaw—is the author’s high-flown, multisyllabic vocabulary, quite likely to send many readers to a dictionary. McDougall's scholarship does not lead him to upbeat prognostications about the future role of the U.S. in the global community. Instead, he predicts that further extensions of American exceptionalism could lead to the citizenry devouring itself on the global stage.
A book remarkable for its depth, breadth, and intellectual daring.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-21145-0
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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