Even readers familiar with Truman’s presidency will be engaged by the story of the campaign that came before.
An absorbing chronicle of the months leading up to the extraordinary 1948 presidential election.
In this insightful look at the players and issues that dominated the campaign, Baime, whose previous book was The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (2017), focuses on the years following Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, leading to Truman’s surprising triumph in the 1948 election. Without downplaying the seriousness of the postwar problems confronting the new president, the author pays particular attention to how they affected his chances for election given his opponents on both the left and the right. These included Henry Wallace, FDR’s one-time vice president, who ran as a Progressive candidate in the 1948 election; Strom Thurmond, founder of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (popularly known as the Dixiecrats); and Thomas Dewey, the popular New York governor and Truman’s main rival. Truman had some unfortunate stumbles in his first years as president, and seemingly everyone—including his wife and daughter—believed that he could never actually win a presidential election. “To err is Truman” was a “popular quip” at the beginning of his presidency. Compounding his woes, Republicans won both houses in the 1946 midterms by a landslide. However, despite his hostility to what he called the “Do-Nothing Congress,” he passed major bills like the Marshall Plan and championed civil rights legislation, which so infuriated the South that many switched allegiance to the Dixiecrats. In 1948, Truman’s name was purposely left off the ballot in Alabama. Baime engagingly chronicles how Truman campaigned vigorously and creatively. Each speech on his whistle-stop tours was tailored to his audience; a documentary, The Truman Story, and a comic-book version of his biography were released in October 1948; and Eleanor Roosevelt gave a stump speech that was broadcast on radio to the entire nation. There were TV and newspaper ads as well.
Even readers familiar with Truman’s presidency will be engaged by the story of the campaign that came before.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-58506-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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