A combative corrective to the view of McCarthy as red-baiting demagogue that finds the true villains in the liberal establishment and the mainstream media. Using archival materials from the former USSR and declassified US materials, Herman (History/George Mason Univ.) offers evidence validating McCarthy’s anti-Communist pursuits: Alger Hiss, the US Army, pro-Communist federal employees. Most satisfying are his Senate scenes, which have the page-turning life of an Allan Drury novel. But overriding these virtues is the tortuous string of narrow characterizations that make much of the book read like a radio talk-show transcript. FDR envoy to Russia Harry Hopkins is a “Communist dupe,— J. Robert Oppenheimer “a conscious Soviet asset,— General Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination to President Truman “a daring experiment.” Predictably, those most responsible for unseating McCarthy are the most radically revised targets. Rather than acting as a moral barometer, Army counsel Joseph Welch is a crafty Eastern Establishment regular mainly interested in how he appeared on TV. Edward R. Murrow is no beacon of truth but an opportunist whose manipulative McCarthy interviews are central to “the modern media’s exalted self-image.” One of the few events escaping revision is McCarthy’s physical attack on adversarial columnist Drew Pearson: The knee in the groin and flattening slap are registered with disapproval. Herman’s own rhetorical punches point to his reductionist definition of the McCarthy era—a battle pitting atheist commie liberals against churchgoing moral conservatives. This limits the author’s credibility and discounts human complexity. To his credit, Herman provides a more distanced view than Richard Rovere did in his benchmark 1959 biography; yet Herman’s relentless politicizing deprives McCarthy of the dignity of a fallen man. A well-researched but hectoring book that fails to redeem McCarthy and antagonizes readers through its reductionist views of the American people. Librarians, prepare for opinion-blackened margins; readers, argue and run—to more balanced historians.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83625-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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