Contains a few useful insights but of tertiary interest to students of the Nixon presidency.
A former Nixon associate, jailed for perjury during the Watergate investigation, professes his loyalty to his former boss.
During his childhood, Chapin (b. 1940) and his family moved from a Kansas farm to Southern California. As a teenager, he fell into politics not long after arriving in Encino, where “we lived right across the street from the flamboyant and very popular pianist Liberace.” After serving as senior class president in high school, he went door to door, “the bottom rung of politics,” for Sam Yorty, “the independent maverick and outspoken mayor of Los Angeles.” Soon he was working as an advance man for Nixon, “the most complex man I’ve ever known.” While Chapin allows that Nixon could be impenetrable and always played his cards close to his chest, he remains a true believer, so much so that he largely pins the Watergate mess on John Dean. Like Chapin, who served time in a country-club prison in California for lying to Congress, Dean, Haldeman, and a few other once-familiar names figure in the narrative. The account is of value for a few small matters, his protestations of innocence not among them—everyone is innocent, by his account, and it’s only through Democratic machinations that he was unfairly jailed. Foremost among the book’s virtues is Chapin’s fly-on-the-wall look at the inner workings of the Nixon White House, with a president given to self-isolation and paranoia, “practiced at revealing very little of himself,” and a staff fraught with internal squabbling. The takeaways on the ever ambitious Henry Kissinger and Al Haig are to the point. However, as the author sagely notes, “Watergate is now becoming ancient history. Most Americans are curious as to what it was about, but their eyes glaze over when anyone starts to talk about the details of the story.” Too much of this frequently self-serving book will induce just that stupor.
Contains a few useful insights but of tertiary interest to students of the Nixon presidency.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307477-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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