The notorious “monkey trial” in expert hands.
Another account—and among the best—of the spectacular 1925 trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher accused of breaking the state’s law against teaching evolution.
The trial itself was a media circus covered by a mob of reporters, most notably and zestfully Henry L. Menken, a fierce, take-no-prisoners polemicist already a national figure. Looking beyond its circus atmosphere, award-winning historian Wineapple notes that the trial “raised issues that have perplexed America since its founding and still do today.” The traditional villain, prosecution lawyer William Jennings Bryan, was a progressive who crusaded for the poor, but he shared the religious fundamentalism, ignorance of science, and casual bigotry common at the time. Hero of stage and screen as well as biographers, his trial opponent Clarence Darrow was a dazzling courtroom lawyer and genuine foe of injustice but also, in Wineapple’s portrait, a shady character: vain, arrogant, and greedy. Defending Scopes, Darrow made brilliant arguments for freedom of speech and religion and called experts to explain evolution, but the jury did not get to hear them because the judge ruled that the jurors’ sole purpose was to determine whether Scopes had broken the law. Evaluating the famous interchange in which Bryan took the stand promising to defend the Bible’s literal truth, Wineapple shares the common judgment that he did a terrible job of it, commenting, “William Jennings Bryan had been no match for Clarence Darrow.” Nonetheless, many observers accused Darrow of humiliating Bryan, who attracted a good deal of sympathy and died five days after the trial. Following Scopes' conviction, the ACLU, which had organized his defense, tried unsuccessfully to remove Darrow’s team from the appeals in favor of more conservative lawyers. What followed was an anticlimax largely ignored by the media: Tennessee’s Supreme Court reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. Aiming to avoid further fireworks, it upheld the Tennessee law but with so many qualifications that it was unenforceable.
The notorious “monkey trial” in expert hands.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593229927
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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