For followers of politics and its practitioners, a capable, readable history of a mendacious tradition.
All presidents lie—but some much more bigly than others.
When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out, writes Nation columnist and author Alterman, he told the new nation a white lie: The pathfinders were supposedly exploring the Mississippi River, a story that, Jefferson wrote, “masks sufficiently the real destination”—namely, the Pacific Ocean. Why would he lie about such a thing? Perhaps to disguise his intentions from prying enemies or perhaps just for the joy of it. Just so, by Alterman’s insightful account, Lyndon Johnson lied about nearly anything he could, though one of his biggest lies—concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident—was based on such faulty information that he might not have known it was a lie. A Mexican invasion of the U.S., a promise not to raise taxes, weapons of mass destruction, oral sex in the Oval Office—presidents tell lies for manifold reasons, sometimes in the interest of national security, sometimes because the lie is the common coin of politics. There are exceptions. Even though “Barack Obama was not perfectly honest with the American people,” he seems to have corrected course once a misstatement or overstatement was brought to his attention; investigators discovered only six “outright falsehoods” in his entire second term. All this brings us, of course, to the undisputed king of presidential fabulists, Donald Trump, who lies as if lies were mother’s milk and who would confuse us were he ever to tell the truth. Alterman’s merry inventory—which includes detailed breakdowns of many of the 10,000 lies calculated to have come from Trump’s mouth between January 2017 and September 2019—is damning, just as much as is a critical moment at the end of the narrative, when MSNBC anchor Nichole Wallace finally closed a report by saying, “But the president isn’t telling the truth.”
For followers of politics and its practitioners, a capable, readable history of a mendacious tradition.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1682-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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