An odd juxtaposition of objective institutional history with a more interesting insider’s look at the laureates.
The history, importance, and impact of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Lundestad (The Rise and Decline of the American "Empire": Power and its Limits in Comparative Perspective, 2012, etc.) brings 25 years of experience as director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize. For the historical sections, the author draws on his two earlier books published in Norwegian in 2015 and 2017. Lundestad begins with the life of Alfred Nobel, who “held over 350 patents in widely varying areas, his will, and the influences on him. Then the author considers the evolution of the Nobel Prize through three eras—the years prior to World War I, the League of Nations years from 1919 to 1939, and the United Nations years from 1948 to the present—and shows how the focus of the prize shifted from international structures promoting peace to opposition to specific regimes to promotion of human rights and democracy and then to protecting the environment. In Chapter 6, Lundestad shifts gears, providing a range of personal profiles of laureates, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Barack Obama. The history section of the narrative is instructive but decidedly academic while the easy-reading portraits are revealing about the recipient, the decision to award the prize, the controversies surrounding the awarding of the prize, and its impact. However, the author does not disclose what individual committee members had to say about the nominees being considered. Lundestad admits that some mistakes have been made, but his arguments for the importance of the Nobel and its continuing influence are convincing. At the end, the author includes a valuable reference tool: a chronological list of Nobel Peace laureates, which gives not just the laureate’s name and country, but also a brief statement of the committee’s rationale for the award.
An odd juxtaposition of objective institutional history with a more interesting insider’s look at the laureates.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-884187-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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