A first-rate history filled with revealing incidents and informed analysis.
A 1st Circuit Court of Appeals judge chronicles the centurieslong push/pull between the executive and the legislative branches over the conduct of America’s wars.
The proposed Constitution designated the president as the commander in chief but reserved for Congress the authority to declare war and to raise an armed force. Notwithstanding assurances from the likes of Alexander Hamilton, patriots George Mason and Patrick Henry refused to support ratification. Almost 200 years later, historian Arthur Schlesinger, who spent his professional career cheerleading on behalf of an energetic executive, reversed himself, chiding a supine Congress for allowing a succession of presidential exercises of military force so consequential they threatened to remake “all aspects of the modern presidency.” Today, most everyone recognizes the folly, as William Howard Taft once observed, of permitting Congress to try, “as the people of Athens attempted, to carry out campaigns by votes in the market-place.” At the same time, few believe decisions about war belong solely to the president. Drawing on numerous episodes from our history, Barron (co-author: City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation, 2008) fleshes out the back and forth between the branches, the elaborate mix of constitutional and statutory law, politics, and popular opinion that shapes decisions about how the country wages war. In smoothly readable prose, with a sure grasp of the big picture, the author addresses such issues as the treatment of enemy prisoners under Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and George W. Bush; FDR’s adroit advocacy of Lend-Lease, which Attorney General Robert Jackson helped engineer, and Harry Truman’s wartime seizure of the steel mills, which Justice Robert Jackson censured; James Buchanan’s deference to Congress as Civil War approached versus Lincoln’s startling assumption of authority in Fort Sumter’s immediate aftermath; congressional acts, resolutions, and amendments designed to rein in presidents from Andrew Johnson to Nixon; presidents Madison and McKinley, virtually stampeded into battle by an aroused Congress; and presidents Adams and Jefferson, who strenuously avoided ruinous wars under similar pressure.
A first-rate history filled with revealing incidents and informed analysis.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8197-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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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