A sad reminder of what we have lost: O’Brien’s penetrating intelligence and earnest voice.
A slim, slicing analysis of some pivotal issues in the presidency of George Washington, who sought to finesse England and France and to deal simultaneously with political foes and two-faced friends at home.
Irish scholar O’Brien (God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism, 2001, etc.) died in 2008, but he left this coda to his 1996 biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Long Affair. Here he shifts focus to Washington, who recognized early on some key and apparently intractable challenges facing his administration and his new country: (1) restore trade relations with England; (2) distance the United States from the excesses of the French Revolution; (3) establish neutrality as England and France puffed chests at each other and stepped ever closer to ruinous war. Washington’s agenda alienated portions of the population, many officials in Washington, D.C., and the opposition press. The most contentious of the newspapers, as O’Brien shows, was Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, which blasted Washington with glee—and with little regard for facts—and which was also receiving surreptitious support from a surprising source, Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. O’Brien depicts a slippery Jefferson, who, with his principal ally, James Madison, engaged in an ultimately losing effort to swing public and foreign policy away from Washington and his ally, Alexander Hamilton. The author offers fresh interpretations of the Whiskey Rebellion—connecting it to the Jay Treaty, which re-established trade with England—and of the tenure of French representative Edmond-Charles Genêt, who underestimated Washington, thereby disappointing his revolutionary patrons in France, who invited him back for a visit to the National Razor. A compassionate Washington instead allowed him to remain in the United States for the rest of his life. O’Brien also assesses Washington’s sly move of sending James Monroe to France, appeasing American supporters of the French Revolution.
A sad reminder of what we have lost: O’Brien’s penetrating intelligence and earnest voice.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-306-81619-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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