Though Wolfe sometimes wants to have it both ways and may be too trusting of the motives of elites, this is a persuasive and...
A withering broadside against the immaturity that infests American politics, revealing itself in populism and demagoguery.
Both the left and the right take it on the chin in this tough-minded analysis by Wolfe (Emeritus, Political Science/Boston Coll.; At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews, 2014, etc.), who has written 22 books. It is not the author’s aim to merely assail the unreasoning, petulant behavior of Donald Trump and his “base,” which is like shooting fish in a barrel. Clearly, Wolfe abhors the president and finds him dangerous yet only a symptom of the disease. What he investigates is why, with all the potential leaders available to them, the American people elected a manifest incompetent. Though his book is very much about the collective childishness of American political discourse, the title is somewhat misleading. It is not just petulance that infects our politics, but also a plague of misguided populism and demagoguery that feeds on ignorance, fear, and a persistent current of racism. While some readers may question the author’s conviction that politics is one of the noblest of human enterprises—“an efficient and beneficial way of holding a society together” without its various parts waging war against each other—his contention that we do not take our political responsibilities seriously enough is inarguable. “Responsible politics cools down rather than heats up,” writes the author, contrasting today's intellectual malaise with a golden age (1940s-1950s) of political thought in America represented by the writers Wolfe calls “the mature liberals.” Some were home-grown, others intellectuals and scholars who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II, well acquainted with what demagoguery had wrought in Europe. Though fierce anti-communists in the main, they were a bulwark against the vituperation of America's most notorious demagogue, Joseph McCarthy.
Though Wolfe sometimes wants to have it both ways and may be too trusting of the motives of elites, this is a persuasive and alarming book.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-55516-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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