A brilliant but ultimately discouraging analysis of how America messed up its big chance.
A brief, painful, and thoughtful analysis of how “the passing of the Cold War could not have been more disorienting.”
More than three decades ago, the United States took credit for defeating communism, and pundits predicted wonderful things. Readers wondering why they never happened should turn to the latest from Bacevich (Emeritus, History/Boston Univ.; (Twilight of the American Century, 2018, etc.). He notes how pundits proclaimed that, as the sole superpower, we would lead the world to a better future with global corporate capitalism enriching everyone. Freedom, in this new era, required a new conception that emphasized individual autonomy. The author laments the decline of traditional morality, and he argues that completing the new order is the concept of presidential supremacy, including a freedom to make war, which presidents employ enthusiastically. Although still considered sacred, Bacevich writes, our Constitution no longer describes a government of three equal branches. The results? Military operations regularly fail at great expense. Unfettered free enterprise has enriched the middle class but excluded many. The most secure career for a high school graduate is the military. The author condemns Donald Trump’s three predecessors, who embraced the new order despite admitting that there were problems that they declined to fix. “Himself a mountebank of the very first order, Trump exposed as fraudulent the triumphalism that served as a signature of the post–Cold War decades,” writes the author. “On this score, Trump mattered and bigly.” Few readers would argue with Bacevich’s conclusion that today’s critical issues are fettering free enterprise in favor of those it excludes, confronting China’s new superpower status, and dealing with climate change, but they’re not catching on. Many Republicans grouse about Trump, but no groundswell opposes him. Democrats promote programs to fight poverty and promote social justice, thrilling their faithful but not former Democrats, some of whom still appreciate Trump’s flamboyant rhetoric.
A brilliant but ultimately discouraging analysis of how America messed up its big chance.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17508-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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