The author’s frequent allusions to the era’s films, TV shows, books and music lend color and context to an already...
A British historian revisits the politics and culture of a miserable American decade.
Tom Wolfe famously dubbed the 1970s “The ‘Me’ Decade,” when anything hopeful or noble about the ’60s either curdled or congealed. Three undistinguished presidencies—Nixon, Ford and Carter—presided over an angry, resentful, self-absorbed populace reeling from Vietnam and Watergate and suffering from high unemployment, inflation and taxes. At the same time, liberalism dozed, either unaware or dismissive of the gathering conservative reaction to a corrupt establishment that, to them, fostered permissiveness, lawlessness and regular assaults on the traditional family. Against this backdrop of cultural decay, working-class discontent and middle-class resentment arose the populist right. Scorned by opponents as kooks and racists, derided as poorly educated and fearful of modernity, these activists helped prepare the ground for the Reagan Revolution. Sandbrook’s principal cast includes characters like James Dobson and his Focus on the Family pressure group; Howard Jarvis, the California anti-tax crusader; Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts and Robert Schuller, evangelists who moved boldly into the political arena; singer Anita Bryant, who campaigned against a gay-rights ordinance in Florida; Louise Day Hicks, who led demonstrations against busing in South Boston; Phyllis Schlafly, who spearheaded opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; Richard Viguerie, who invented direct-mail fundraising on behalf of conservative causes; and Paul Weyrich, who helped bring big money to the movement and whose Heritage Foundation offered ideological guidance. Sandbrook (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, 2005, etc.) also surveys a multitude of ’70s phenomena, including redneck chic, the booming of the Sunbelt, the revival of country music, the surprising nostalgia for the ’50s, Bobby Riggs v. Billy Jean King, Norman Mailer v. Germaine Greer, New York as Fear City and California Dreaming becoming the Golden State Nightmare.
The author’s frequent allusions to the era’s films, TV shows, books and music lend color and context to an already penetrating and evenhanded political analysis.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4262-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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