Intermittently interesting tales from the presidential tapes. Since FDR, most but not all presidents have recorded White House meetings and telephone conversations; Reagan, not surprisingly, even videotaped many private meetings. The existence of such tapes should provide a fascinating glimpse of the real person behind the great Oz of the presidency. In fact, it does and it doesn’t. Doyle (The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 1989), creator of a television documentary on the White House tapes, has put a lot of effort into compiling tapes and transcribing them, but he has had to work within limitations. Most presidents didn’t tape much (such as FDR and Truman), others not at all (Bush), and of those who did tape a lot (think Nixon), what they said is already pretty well known. Also, most presidents (except Nixon, whose voice-activated system often, and famously, made him forget he was on tape) were quite aware they were being recorded, and so it’s questionable how authentic the presented personas are. To compensate, Doyle offers as a theme the differing styles of presidents as executives: Eisenhower the “organized executive,” Kennedy the “pragmatic executive,” and so on. Tape transcripts are used to amplify this theme, rather than serving, as the title suggests, as the center of attention. Why is there a rather long chapter on Bush when he didn’t tape anything? There are interesting tidbits here and there: FDR speaking condescendingly and duplicitously to a group of civil rights leaders; generals in a meeting with JFK during the Bay of Pigs crisis, miffed because he won’t let them start a thermonuclear war, openly venting their disgust with him after he exits the meeting with the tape machine still running. Such moments are few and far between, however,. A promising idea, but the book does not deliver. (8 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 1-56836-285-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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