A stirring look at a shameful episode that holds distressing relevance for today.
Revelations about a period of deep corruption that rocked American politics.
Masters, host and producer of the public TV series Lost L.A., makes an impressive book debut with a brisk, lively history of a political scandal, “one of those Roaring Twenties spectacles…that held the entire nation spellbound.” The central figures were newly elected Montana Sen. Burton Wheeler, eager to make his reputation as a crusader for public integrity, and the nation’s ruthless, manipulative Attorney General, Harry Daugherty. Appointed by President Warren B. Harding, Daugherty proved a bane for Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, especially when Wheeler uncovered endemic fraud, bribery, and blackmail. In 1922, the Harding administration leased a Wyoming oil field known as Teapot Dome to politically connected oilmen, “in secret and without competitive bidding.” Wheeler hoped that Teapot Dome “would prove to be only the first domino to fall—a prelude to an even more troubling scandal that would expose threats to impartial justice, congressional independence, and the rule of law itself.” Convening a select committee, Wheeler heard evidence from an assortment of Daugherty’s associates, notably the smarmy Gaston Means, who testified that he carried out “black-bag operations” for which he “collected cash—lots of it.” One witness testified that he had “uncovered more than $7 million of fraud in the government’s wartime aviation contracts, only to have his findings ignored by higher-ups,” and “another was fired after his inquiry into Prohibition violations along the US-Mexican border implicated a federal prosecutor.” Drawing on extensive archival research, Masters creates a tense narrative peopled by colorful, often unsavory characters. “Wheeler’s investigation,” Masters writes, “shocked the American people into caring whether the Department of Justice was actually pursuing justice—or something else entirely.” The feisty senator, Masters asserts, revealed both the force of congressional investigations and the heady power of the court of public opinion.
A stirring look at a shameful episode that holds distressing relevance for today.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780306826139
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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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