Essential reading that shows the straight line that runs from Sandy Hook to Charlottesville and Jan. 6.
A sobering, even depressing book that speaks to the American addiction to conspiracy theories and outright lies.
New York Times writer Williamson has made her beat the prosecution of right-wing ideologues and the dismantling of their machineries of deception. Here, she excoriates Alex Jones, the online blowhard who, soon after a young man killed 20 first graders and six teachers at a Connecticut elementary school, declared the massacre a “false flag” exercise meant to provide the Obama administration the opportunity to attack the Second Amendment. Anyone who followed Jones at the time could have seen his harangues coming; what’s surprising about this account is how so many credentialed academics followed suit, lumping the Sandy Hook killings into a messy cycle of conspiracy theories involving the JFK assassination, 9/11, and other events. Millions of like-minded people who have the right to vote (and own guns) partake of such theories, fanned recently by Trump, the fomenter of a mendacious conspiracy theory that he rightfully won the 2020 presidential election. “From a decade’s distance,” writes Williamson, “Sandy Hook stands as a portent: a warning of the power of unquenchable viral lies to leap the firewalls of decency and tradition, to engulf accepted fact and established science, and to lap at the foundations of our democratic institutions.” Sandy Hook became part and parcel of the paranoiac style of American thought—or perhaps better, nonthought. It can be fought, and Williamson records how the battle was taken into the courtroom, where numerous conspiracy theorists paid for their lies with jury-ruled financial penalties, while Jones’ social media outlets were “deplatformed” and most of the errant academics lost their jobs. We won’t know the outcome of the actions against Jones until 2022, but the author makes it clear that the remedies to curb what Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts” exist.
Essential reading that shows the straight line that runs from Sandy Hook to Charlottesville and Jan. 6.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4657-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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