Histories of ideas are rarely page-turners, but Werth has done the trick.
A rich, entertaining slab of Victorian American history, focused on the debate over evolution.
Adopting a format similar to Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club (2001), historian Werth (The Scarlet Professor, 2001, etc.) follows a dozen figures who made “survival of the fittest” the guiding principle of the Gilded Age. He stresses that Charles Darwin shared the American media spotlight with fellow Englishman Herbert Spencer, who actually coined the famous phrase and felt Darwin received too much credit. More philosopher than naturalist, Spencer wrote on human evolution, interpreting Darwinian natural selection in ways scientists now consider spurious. In Darwin’s view, fitness described an organism’s ability to adapt; the fittest were not the strongest, but those who produced the most offspring. In Spencer’s more pugnacious version, humans battled it out. The strong overpowered the weak, grew prosperous and became civilized, thus evolving into a more advanced species. In the turbulent years following the Civil War, this idea galvanized enthusiastic American “social Darwinists.” They believed Spencer’s version of evolution proved that America’s entrepreneurial spirit, wealth and laissez-faire government marked its citizens as a superior race. Not everyone agreed, and Werth gives an engrossing account of the lives and quarrels of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Huxley, Louis Agassiz, Carl Schurz, Henry Ward Beecher, Victoria Woodhull and a half-dozen undeservedly lesser-known figures. Many digressions into their private lives, such as the media circus surrounding minister Beecher’s adultery, seem distantly related to the evolution controversy, but few readers will skip them. The finale recounts the 1882 dinner at Delmonico’s, where a Who’s Who of leading men assembled to honor Spencer. Their adulatory speeches brilliantly summarize the book’s theme, although Spencer bit the hands that fed him by lecturing the Americans on being excessively preoccupied with business and preaching the need for a “gospel of relaxation.”
Histories of ideas are rarely page-turners, but Werth has done the trick.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6778-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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