Good bedside reading, with pieces that are short, digestible, and sometimes soporific.
A motley collection that illustrates both the obsessions and the daffiness of Right and Left during the ’90s.
Ubiquitous journalists Hitchens (Why Orwell Matters, p. 1195) and Caldwell (Senior Editor, The Weekly Standard), representing, respectively, the Left and the Right, selected the pieces to represent their own camps, and each wrote the introduction to the other’s selections (both are feather-light and forgettable). Not much for surprises here. From the Left come criticisms of our country’s support of friendly dictators, of intolerance (“An American society without liberalism,” writes Philip Green, “would be a sinkhole of racism, sexism and every form of unabashed bigotry”), of private militias, of child labor, of companies that mistreat workers, of capital punishment. From the Right come attacks on the Clintons and Kennedys (Peter Collier’s comments on the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. permit him to scourge the rest of the family, living and otherwise), on Janet Reno (she returned Elian to Communism), on anti-smokers and feminists. Occasionally, there is some overlap. Both sides take on The Bell Curve—Adolph Reed Jr., with skill and erudition; Andrew Sullivan, with surprising and surpassing ignorance. There are also some gems in both segments. On the Left: Susan Sontag’s poignant piece about Bosnia (1995); Christopher D. Cook’s hard look at “workfare” (1998); Ruth Conniff’s discoveries about the feckless “drug war” in Colombia (1992). On the Right: Francis X. Bacon’s Shakespearean satire of the Clintons (1994); William Monahan’s hilarious rant about the loss of his Right to Smoke (1999); Thomas Fleming’s piquant comments on a new edition of Strunk and White (1999). The award for Most Paranoid, Racist, and Sexist Piece goes to Kenneth Minogue (2001), who argues that “the radical feminist revolution is nothing less than a destruction of our civilization” and that women and people of color lack the “capacity to innovate.”
Good bedside reading, with pieces that are short, digestible, and sometimes soporific.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56025-409-2
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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