Strongly written and thought-provoking—a must read for nonhistorians seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history.
An engaging warts-and-all history of the U.S. meant to better educate those who fight for it.
Examining the country’s history from its European “discovery” through Trump, Sjursen, a retired U.S. Army major and history instructor at West Point, expands on the course he taught there to help close “the gap between what scholars know and what students learn” about American history. Describing his approach to the original course, he writes, “exposure to the historical myths and flaws—in addition to the well-worn triumphs—of the country they might very well die for seemed appropriate. Anything less would have felt obscene.” Sjursen divides the book into 37 largely chronological chapters, many with provocative titles such as “Andrew Jackson’s White Male World and the Start of Modern Politics,” “Lies We Tell Ourselves About the Old West,” “JFK’s Cold War Chains,” and “The Obama Disappointment.” Throughout this fluid, readable history, the author provides illuminating comparisons between elements of American history and the modern world. “The Massachusetts Bay Colony,” he writes, “may indeed have more in common with modern Saudi Arabia—executing ‘witches’ and ‘sorcerers’—than it does with contemporary Boston.” These comparisons help readers better understand and contextualize the topics discussed. In each chapter, the author breaks down the positive and negative aspects of the subject, allowing readers to reconsider our shared history, with each chapter building on the previous one. Though mostly based on previous works, Sjursen’s book serves as an ideal overview of American history and a study guide to many of the events and figures that have been misrepresented in standard historical narratives. “The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears,” writes the author early on, “inform the sort of country we think we are, the public policy we craft, and even what we imagine possible.” Sjursen tells those stories with aplomb.
Strongly written and thought-provoking—a must read for nonhistorians seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-58642-254-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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