With the breadth of knowledge and stylistic astringency that have characterized his score of other works, Pulitzer Prize—winner Wills (John Wayne’s America, 1997, etc.) attacks skepticism about federal power that corrodes political discourse. In the last few years, pitched battles against centralized power have erupted from many quarters, including the militia movement, bombers of abortion clinics, advocates of term limits, the National Rifle Association, even the Gingrich-led GOP in its takeover of Congress in the 1994 election. Wills believes that historical and constitutional justifications for Beltway-bashing lack any basis in fact—as if “people could stay loyal to the Constitution only if they felt it was structurally disloyal to itself.” Opposition has taken many forms, he notes, including nullification (Jefferson and even Madison briefly succumbed to this by secretly writing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions), secession, insurrectionism (e.g., Timothy McVeigh), vigilantism, withdrawing (e.g., Thoreau at Walden Pond), and disobeying (Martin Luther King Jr., who succeeded by battling one set of laws rather than questioning the legitimacy of government itself). Underlying such diverse movements is a cluster of attitudes that tend to be traditional, provincial, spontaneous, religious, rights-oriented, and participatory. Taking issue with the truism that democracies intentionally limit governmental efficiency, Wills notes that Madison and the other framers of the Constitution strengthened federal power by forbidding states to coin money, make treaties, set terms for citizenship, and the like. Wills’s wide net often snares relevant yet overlooked evidence that undercuts treasured American myths (e.g., pointing out that the “Wild West,” instead of relying on the handgun, often banned its use). An iconoclastic history of one of the major currents in American politics, written with relentless logic and scholarly Çlan. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84489-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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