A trove of entertaining stories about the drama, pratfalls, and sheer weirdness of presidents.
Depression, incompetence, hidden illnesses, idiotic political decisions, assassination attempts, and sex scandals are among the dark secrets unearthed in this compendium of presidential lore.
California State University historian Henig meanders through thematically arranged biographical anecdotes about presidential quirks and failings. Topics include the effects of personal tragedies (the death of his son turned Calvin Coolidge from an engaged leader into a listless recluse); deceptive image-making (like Edith Wilson’s cover-up of husband Woodrow’s debilitating stroke and Franklin Roosevelt’s charade of mobility after his legs were paralyzed by polio); gross policy miscalculations (James Polk imagined that war with Mexico would help unify the United States, but it sowed the seeds of the Civil War); and the relentless sexual appetites of the cold, brusque John Kennedy and the schmoozy, smarmy Bill Clinton. Appearing in many categories of dysfunction is Lyndon Johnson, who is revealed here to be a bullying boss, a liar and strategic bungler, and a deeply perverted man (he had a fetish for displaying his penis, which he dubbed Jumbo, in many inappropriate contexts). Henig’s bite-size essays reveal the banal flaws of great men but also humanize them—Washington, he notes, became president in part because he was deep in debt and needed a steady paycheck. The colorful profiles reveal character in vivid, elegant prose, whether depicting Warren G. Harding’s hapless self-loathing (“he had no shame revealing how he felt: ‘I am not fit for this office and should never have been here’”) or Teddy Roosevelt’s unstoppable self-promotion. (“Amidst gasps of horror and cries of ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ Roosevelt unbuttoned his vest and revealed his bloodstained shirt,” he writes of an incident in which Roosevelt went ahead with a scheduled speech minutes after being shot by a madman.) Full of surprising revelations—conservative icon Ronald Reagan tried to join the Communist Party in 1938, but they rebuffed him—the result is a stimulating reference book for history buffs and casual readers alike.
A trove of entertaining stories about the drama, pratfalls, and sheer weirdness of presidents.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781634896801
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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