Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist FitzGerald (Cities on a Hill, 1986, etc.) mixes comprehensive detail and tart observation in this account of high-tech meeting high-touch—the promotion of the Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI) by Ronald Reagan. The first two years of the Reagan administration were characterized by a foreign-policy paralysis, in which the amiable but remote President was unable to choose between hard-line anticommunists and pragmatists searching for an accommodation with the Soviets. By 1983 the administration had launched the largest US military buildup in peacetime history, thereby dividing NATO and igniting the nuclear-freeze movement. In that year, Reagan called on scientists to perfect a technology that would render ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” The ensuing “Star Wars” initiative of lasers and particle-beam hardware was formally unveiled in 1985. It was, FitzGerald believes, “Reagan’s greatest triumph as an actor-storyteller,” defanging the freeze movement at one stroke and garnering congressional votes from both Democrats and Republicans despite widespread doubts as to its feasibility. FitzGerald untangles the origins of Reagan’s views on SDI, sketches the ferocious Washington infighting it set off (between George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, arms-control negotiator Paul Nitze, and others), and depicts the four groundbreaking summits it incited with Gorbachev. She disputes that SDI caused the Soviets to make the concessions that produced the INF treaty and START I, though, noting that Gorbachev dismissed the program as a military threat. Still, she credits Reagan, the most saber-rattling of postwar presidents, with enough prescience to recognize (long before many of his most devoted followers) that the Cold War had reached its end. A difficult subject, endowed with enough drama, irony, and political perception to match its importance.
Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84416-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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