Breaks no new ground but provides an excellent introduction to leading historians and the books every engaged American...
Interviews with 15 major American historians and the current chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Since 2013, financier and philanthropist Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, has corralled the heavy hitters of American history for conversations held in the Library of Congress, intended for the edification of our elected representatives. His admirable goal has been to provide “information about the great leaders and events of our country’s past, with the hope that…bringing the members together in a neutral, nonpartisan setting might modestly contribute toward reducing the seemingly increasing partisan rancor that has become so commonplace in Washington.” That aim has flopped, but the text, accompanied by a generous selection of archival images from the LOC, provides a smooth education in American history, with an emphasis on presidents. Eschewing controversy and avoiding penetrating insights, Rubenstein asks leading questions; his responders, all veterans of the lecture hall or book tour, lay out the facts and their expert interpretations. According to Jack D. Warren Jr., George Washington was America’s essential man. David McCullough joins the chorus supporting John Adams’ rising reputation. Though Thomas Jefferson’s continues its decline, Jon Meachem finds much to praise. Women are underrepresented, but Cokie Roberts has good things to say about Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and others. The longest biographies—Robert Caro’s five volumes on Lyndon Johnson and Taylor Branch’s three on Martin Luther King Jr.—are already classics only partly because of their literary brilliance. LBJ’s support of the Civil Rights Act was perhaps the most courageous political act of the century because he did it with full knowledge that it would inflict permanent damage on his party. MLK and his allies were certainly heroes of their time, but the villains he faced make a more vivid impression. Other contributors include H.W. Brands, Bob Woodward, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Breaks no new ground but provides an excellent introduction to leading historians and the books every engaged American should read.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982120-25-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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