An insider’s knowing and engaging portrait, not to be found in any guidebook. (16-page photo insert, not seen)
Washington hand Solomon (Where They Ain’t, 1999) astutely tracks three families of American aristocrats who wielded power inside the Beltway through the 20th century.
The mores of the managers and movers, the privileged and the needy, the socialites, lawyers, lobbyists, developers, and politicos of Washington, DC, are distilled in the intertwined tales of the Jewish Cafritz family, the African-American Hobsons, and the Boggs clan, a set of southern politicians and lobbyists. Through the revolving doors of power passed these remarkable people, who could thrive nowhere better than in the District. Wealthy widow Gwen Cafritz, doyenne of Washington society and supporter of the arts, saw things differently than husband Morris or their three sons. Though they all were effective in the cause of civil rights, prickly and abrasive Julius Hobson Sr. made choices quite different from those of his only son or his two wives. After husband Hale’s untimely death, Lindy Boggs succeeded him in Congress; one of their children became the city’s leading lawyer-lobbyist, another became mayor of the borough of Princeton, and the third became Cokie Roberts. Spanning a century, the networked positions of influence occupied by these three families encompassed such diverse events as school integration, a gigantic corporate bailout, a riot, and the death of the Clinton health-care initiative, as well as cruel robberies and important garden parties. National Journal contributing editor Solomon examines it all: presidential administrations from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, paladins of power from Perle Mesta to Marion Barry, and generations of civil servants who were not necessarily servile or even civil. He presents a solid social history of the nation’s capital, which seems to have become a bit less affable lately. The increasingly internecine story will no doubt continue.
An insider’s knowing and engaging portrait, not to be found in any guidebook. (16-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621372-X
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
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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