A remarkable synthesis, impressive on many levels.
Award-winning historian Reynolds (English, American Studies/City Univ. of New York; John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, 2005, etc.) charts the political, cultural, economic, artistic, scientific and religious currents roiling America from the Era of Good Feelings to the verge of the Civil War.
Covering precisely the same slice of American history in half as many pages as Daniel Walker Howe’s recent and celebrated What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), Reynolds applies his vast erudition to a period too often treated as mere prelude to the country’s most destructive war, the era that derives its name from the only figure between Monroe and Lincoln sufficiently charismatic to have been twice elected president. If the author’s storytelling falls short of his usual smooth standard, he may be forgiven for accomplishing what amounts to, even at this length, a remarkable feat of distillation. The political story features a familiar cast of sectional heroes—Clay, Calhoun and Webster—and Presidents Adams, Jackson, Van Buren and Polk dealing (or not dealing) with issues like slavery, Indian removal, tariffs, the Bank of the United States, nullification, war and the annexation of Texas. Reynolds is most adept handling the period’s art and literature—he is remarkably clear-eyed about the Transcendentalists—and he brilliantly explores the religious scene’s variety, tumult and frequent humbuggery. More than anything, he conveys the era’s sheer weirdness: where the self-made Van Buren could be successfully characterized as the out-of-touch aristocrat against the genuinely privileged Harrison; where real scientific achievement (the steamboat, telegraph and railroad) competed for legitimacy with the pseudo-scientific mesmerism, spiritualism and phrenology; where the Antimasons could be a national political force; where the Petticoat Affair could undo a presidential cabinet; where the common man president could be credibly lampooned as King Andrew; where the high art of Hawthorne and Melville competed for public favor with minstrel shows and the freakish attractions of P.T. Barnum. Abolitionism and prison reform and movements on behalf of sexual liberation, women’s rights, temperance and vegetarianism all flowered in this strange time, which gave us enduring phrases like “O.K.,” “Jim Crow” and “Manifest Destiny.”
A remarkable synthesis, impressive on many levels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-082656-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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