A fascinating, ultimately puzzling deep dive into one county’s electoral behavior.
Bradlee (The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, 2013, etc.) immerses himself among the voters of one Pennsylvania county, hoping to discover why a majority of voters there supported Donald Trump for president.
What the veteran journalist learned in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre is the major city in a predominately rural area) will mostly hearten devoted Republican supporters, mostly upset Democratic supporters, and perhaps baffle independent voters. By one measure, Luzerne County is typical because Trump won in 2,584 counties, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 493 counties. Looking closer, though, Luzerne is an atypical Trump stronghold, since many of the residents were labor unionists who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates. During previous presidential elections, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had won majorities there. A Trump victory seemed plausible because during the Republican primary in Luzerne County, 5,643 registered Democrats shifted to the Republican side to choose among the large number of candidates, and many of the shifters decided Trump would be the best choice. As Bradlee relates the findings from his in-depth conversations with Luzerne voters, he avoids stereotypes and pat answers. Trump detractors across the nation labeled him a racist, but how could the author call Trump voters unadulterated racists when so many had cast ballots for Obama in the previous election? Regardless, race and ethnicity clearly influenced some Trump supporters interviewed by Bradlee. Trump’s draconian immigration policies aimed at Spanish speakers gained widespread favor among Luzerne County voters, many of whom were alarmed by the increase in the Hispanic population. Apart from support or opposition to Trump’s policy proposals, voters who spoke with Bradlee made clear that they would have preferred any candidate to Hillary Clinton, having believed every false Republican claim about her; that they knew nothing about Trump’s past as a failed businessman; and that allegations of his sexual assaults and overall misogyny could be forgiven at the polling booth.
A fascinating, ultimately puzzling deep dive into one county’s electoral behavior.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-51573-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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