The oft-told story of the making of the Constitution always deserves retelling, and Berkin is just right for the job.
A lucid study in constitutional history and a meditation on the decline of small-r republican values in the age of the imperial presidency.
Berkin (American History/CUNY; First Generations, 1996) opens her account of the Constitution’s creation with two recent examples (both already overused) illustrating the conflicts that obtain between the Founding Fathers’ intentions and the realities of modern America. The 2000 presidential election demonstrates the apparently imperfect nature of our “hybrid of universal suffrage and [the] older mechanism of an electoral college,” while the aftermath of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center reveals that Americans have come to expect their president “to set our agenda in every aspect of domestic and foreign relations.” This expectation would have horrified members of the revolutionary generation of 1776, who mistrusted the executive and placed their hopes in an independent, representative legislative body. George Washington, Berkin writes, “believed his role in government was exemplary rather than directive,” that the president should be a model of decorum and disinterest “removed from the tarnishing effects of ambition, greed, and factional wrangling” in daily politics. (Try telling that to the last few presidents.) She allows that the Founding Fathers’ profound localism and wariness of centralized government soon gave way to the realization that citizens seemed to prefer looking to a single leader rather than committees or caucuses; even so, she professes surprise that Americans today have so little investment in the workings of the legislative branch, which many of the framers of the Constitution believed should be responsible for electing the president: In the words of Virginian George Mason, allowing the people to elect a leader directly was as unnatural as it would be “to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”
The oft-told story of the making of the Constitution always deserves retelling, and Berkin is just right for the job.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100948-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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