While mainly for specialists, this provocative and obviously timely analysis is an important reminder of the role that...
The moderate tradition in American politics.
“Ideologues may come and go, but as long as the republic persists, the prevailing tradition trends moderate,” writes Brown (History/Elizabethtown Coll.; Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, 2009, etc.). In this welcome academic study, Brown—who wrote a biography of Richard Hofstadter, the noted historian who famously traced the paranoid strain in U.S. politics—considers the pragmatic, centrist leaders who have shaped America. From the skeptical New Englander John Adams, who avoided the partisanship of post-Revolution politics, to “consensus-driven realist” Barack Obama, there has always been a moderate style of leadership that “has on occasion proven to be a saving grace of sorts in American politics.” In densely detailed prose, Brown traces the centrist coalitions of various periods, from anti-slavery advocates to patrician-led opponents of political corruption, and examines the actions of their leaders, including Teddy Roosevelt, an honest broker between capital and labor, and Bill Clinton, who claimed “the prevailing middle ground in a post–New Deal, post-Reagan political culture.” The author’s other noted centrists include Abraham Lincoln and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Brown notes that before the Civil War, people expected to compromise on issues. Centrism reached a significant low point with the 1964 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who deemed moderates timid and indecisive. From our present politically divisive perspective, many of the author’s observations are jolting—e.g., moderate Republicans controlled the GOP from 1936 to 1976, and three generations of the primarily centrist Bush family influenced U.S. politics from 1952 to 2009. Brown quotes former Secretary of State Colin Powell approvingly when he urged his party to “drift a little bit back [to the center]…because that’s where the American people are.”
While mainly for specialists, this provocative and obviously timely analysis is an important reminder of the role that reason and compromise have played in bridging the gap between political extremes.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2923-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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