An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops.
A scintillating group biography of once-famed journalists who were alternately friends, allies, lovers, and rivals.
Of the central ring of reporters Cohen profiles in this excellent ensemble study, only John Gunther is well remembered, mostly for his bestselling 1949 book, Death Be Not Proud. Some second-tier members are better known: William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), and Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Yet everyone who passes under Cohen’s gaze is fascinating: H.R. Knickerbocker, known as Knick, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalin’s Russia; Jimmy Sheean, who won the first National Book Award for biography, in 1935; Dorothy Thompson, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau, in Berlin; and Gunther’s wife, Frances, an intimate of Jawaharlal Nehru’s with a lively command of both the English language and world politics. All produced extraordinary reportage that helped American readers understand the forces leading up to World War II, undertaking considerable risks. As Sheean wrote of Thompson, she excelled because “she could always step over the corpses and go on, steadily, resolutely, right to the end, with her head held very high indeed,” while Knick spent a terrifying couple of days sure that he would be executed by “Franco’s goons.” Cohen’s narrative reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue—e.g., Gunther had an affair with a Danish journalist who was a guest of Hitler’s at the 1936 Olympics, slept with John F. Kennedy, and was suspected of being a spy but really was just “an equal opportunity enchantress.” The reporters’ prescience was extraordinary, as when Sheean predicted that Gandhi would be killed by another Hindu. Cohen, a professor of humanities at Northwestern, convincingly argues, too, that journalism was the true literature of the interwar period, shaped by outsiders from small towns who wanted to better understand the world.
An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-51119-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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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