An instructive history that speaks to the better angels of the American nature.
A national security scholar delivers a study of national division in which well-placed individuals override the dominant public opinion.
Contemplating whether to place Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover to investigate their loyalty. Surprisingly, given his racism, Hoover “informed the President that there was no reason for concern.” Roosevelt proceeded anyway, giving in to a small number of Army officers and to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, although an immigrant and minority member himself, supported internment. All this was in stark contrast to American public opinion, with one official government poll revealing that only 19% of those surveyed believed that internment was proper and desirable. In similar spirit, while the earliest period of American occupation of post–World War II Germany was marked by punitive and even vengeful policies, eventually the Truman administration took a more lenient attitude. Americans were also willing to give up a portion of their food and incomes to take care of the defeated Germans, and they organized a relief train to France with an astounding 481 railroad cars filled with food. As Shore notes, there may have been a “performative dimension” to this, the desire to show that Americans were kind and generous. However, Americans were also overwhelmingly on the right side of history during several key moments in which the governing class erred: the atomic bombing of Japan, for instance, whose aim of ending the war might have been accomplished just as easily by dropping one into the sea as a demonstration. Shore closes his detailed study with a nicely ironic moment in which a federal judge, one of those Japanese Americans interned as a child, rules against the Trump administration for its concentration camps for children caught crossing illegally into the U.S.
An instructive history that speaks to the better angels of the American nature.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781009203449
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
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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