A welcome addition to any journalist’s library, and an inspiring read for rising Woodward-Bernsteins.
An overstuffed, well-made anthology of writings by muckrakers both eminent and unknown.
“The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy is bullshit.” So observed Washington-based newspaper columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, providing a motto that Pete Hamill, writing in the foreword to this volume, is only too glad to hand on to neophyte journalists. Nation contributing editor Shapiro here assembles a fine sampler of writings that take on that ubiquitous, persistent enemy; just as he notes that the term “investigative journalism” defies easy definition, he offers excerpts that range from death-defying reportage to easy-chair punditry. Among the most memorable pieces are Henry Adams’s sharp dissection of an 1869 scandal authored by Wall Street tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, one that, with a few substitutions, may remind some readers of the recent bubble; Upton Sinclair’s spirited defense of the methods and findings used and drawn from his investigation of the meat-packing industry, which yielded both his 1906 book The Jungle and reforms in the meat-packing industry; and Seymour Hersh’s extraordinary reports, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1969, of American soldiers’ massacring South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai—reports that, among other things, recount the widespread resentment among American officers that one of their own should have been charged with murder. (“He’s a good soldier,” one officer remarks of Lt. William Calley. “He followed orders.” Adds another, “Killing becomes nothing in Vietnam.”) Though some of the selections pack less punch than others, and though the anthology highlights crusaders and reformists on the left (perhaps for the simple reason, as Hamill remarks, that, with the exception of William Safire, the right has produced few reliable muckrakers of its own), Shapiro’s editorial judgment is sound throughout, and his commentary on the texts will prove useful to readers without much background in the dig-and-disturb tradition of reporting.
A welcome addition to any journalist’s library, and an inspiring read for rising Woodward-Bernsteins.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-433-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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 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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