Schlesinger's first book since his National Book Award-winning Robert Kennedy and His Times, this one exploring the grand themes which he sees weaving their way through American History. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner sees themes in contention over the meaning of America. The first, which he calls "the tradition," sprang from Christianity "as mediated by Augustine and Calvin." This strand made of the American experience an "implacable process of testing." As Schlesinger puts it. "Antiquity haunted the federal imagination." The second strand, termed "the counter tradition," also had roots in Calvinism and was represented in an emergent spirit of national destiny. Ever since our earliest history, Schlesinger suggests, our society has pitted realism against messianism, experiment against destiny. Pragmatically, this contention has resulted in alternating periods of reform and retrenchment. Schlesinger, mirroring the writings of economist Albert Hirschman, refers to these as periods of private interest and public purpose. Up to this point, Schlesinger's book appears to be Olympian in its objectivity. He is speaking as the aging historian emeritus who has earned the right to philosophize. However, suddenly the rest of the book degenerates into a slapdash (the book is actually a collection of updated, previously published essays) compendium of political writings aimed at demonstrating, for the most part, his own suspicion of the private-interest periods and his attraction to public purpose governments. He attempts, somewhat weakly, to demolish the idea that America's economic development was a direct result of the spirit of laissez-faire. The Founding Fathers, he states, were basically mercantilists who recognized the need for strong state action; Adam Smith, far from reflecting their ideals, actually wrote The Wealth of Nations to refute them. Undeniably a worthy and important work, if one keeps a wary eye out for the political bias.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1986
ISBN: 0395957931
Page Count: 516
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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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