An admirably balanced assessment of an enormously complicated man who, wrongly but not ignobly, stood athwart history.
A sympathetic reappraisal of Joseph P. Kennedy’s controversial tenure as America’s ambassador to Britain.
With the European dictators Mussolini and Hitler becoming increasingly belligerent, Kennedy’s 1938 appointment to the Court of St. James’s came at an especially dangerous time. The first Irish-Catholic ever to fill the distinguished position, the successful businessman actively sought the honor. Despite friends’ warnings that his background, temperament and talents ill-suited him for the job, Kennedy headed for London intent on keeping the United States neutral in the war everyone feared was approaching. At first, along with his large and attractive family, he charmed all of London. In a detailed text that never becomes tedious, Swift (The Roosevelts and the Royalty, 2004, etc.) explains how it all turned sour and how the ambassadorship quickly morphed from a glittering culmination into the sad undoing of Kennedy’s public-service career. While he concedes that Kennedy’s own ambition, independence, pride, stubbornness and thin skin contributed to his failure, Swift insists, for the most part persuasively, that the old fox was himself outfoxed by FDR, who knew precisely how to manipulate him. Kennedy’s isolationism, his fear of the devastation that would be wrought by a second world war, Swift reminds us, perfectly mirrored popular opinion in the United States. Focusing primarily on how the ambassador gradually lost the confidence of both the U.S. and British governments, Swift also pays significant attention to Rose, who reveled in the social status accorded the ambassador’s wife; to daughter Kathleen, who became something of a debutante sensation; to sons Joe Jr. and Jack, who served intermittently as aides to their father; and to an array of famous names—Nancy Astor, Clare Booth Luce, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, Pope Pius XXII—who were all part of the Kennedys’ orbit.
An admirably balanced assessment of an enormously complicated man who, wrongly but not ignobly, stood athwart history.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-117356-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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