A well-polished, lustrous piece of American history.
White House History editor Seale (The Garden Club of America's One Hundred Years of a Growing Legacy, 2013, etc.) takes the reader on a tour through the nation's corridors of power during the decades when Washington, D.C., emerged as a truly world capital.
The author has written extensively about the White House and many other historical American buildings. Here, he weaves together separate narrative threads about international affairs, diplomatic and political history, culture, architecture and city building. His starting point is April 11, 1893, the day that British ambassador Sir Julian Pauncefote presented his credentials to President Grover Cleveland. The upgrade from minister plenipotentiary to ambassador meant the U.S. president would henceforth be recognized as a head of state like others. “Quietly, symbolically,” writes Seale, “the White House ceremony marked the beginning of a new age for the mighty North American democracy.” The author traces the changes that flowed from such a development, while introducing the people who made it all possible. The U.S. moved to assert its new position and prepared to establish its global power in partnership and competition with the U.K. and against the Spanish. Men like Alvey Adee, a long-serving official in the State Department, John Hay, Lincoln's former private secretary, and historian and journalist Henry Adams formed a circle of friendship, which helped the change. Meanwhile, the nation's architects believed America's new global position merited the reassessment of questions of the design of the capitol building and the kinds of architectural themes that would dominate public building. Officials dusted off Pierre Charles L'Enfant's original designs and had marble from Vermont and elsewhere shipped into the capital to build Union Station, the Smithsonian Institution and many other iconic structures. The capital's social life and fashions were transformed accordingly.
A well-polished, lustrous piece of American history.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58834-391-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
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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