All in all, a piffling and pet-peevish book, but sure to provoke merriment in cafes up and down the Champs Elysées.
Put down your freedom fries, citoyens, and pause in awe as right-wing historian Himmelfarb attempts to rescue the Enlightenment from the awful French.
Mais oui, the French, “who have dominated and usurped” the Enlightenment, imagining—the nerve—that the likes of Diderot and Rousseau ever had any influence on the rest of the world. And then there are the insidious postmodernists, who, even though they’re sort of French themselves, have announced that inasmuch as slavery, war, and other evils persisted even as the philosophes converted good men and women to their cause, there is no need to pay any attention to “the Enlightenment project.” Well, stuff and nonsense, thunders Himmelfarb (One Nation, Two Cultures, 1999, etc.): the Enlightenment is enduring and just fine, and especially so if one restores it “to its progenitor: the British.” Wait a second, Angus: not the Scottish, but the British, by which Himmelfarb, through a neat bit of linguistic and geographical legerdemain, really means the English. (Yes, Hume was Scottish. Yes, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson were Scottish. But, bending time and space, Himmelfarb proposes adding John Locke and Isaac Newton to the mix, as well as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, to say nothing of Edward Gibbon, Joseph Priestly, and Thomas Paine, whereupon the sadly outnumbered Scots recede north of the Humber.) And the contribution of these Enlightened English to the enterprise? Why, the insistence not on “reason,” a touchy subject, “but the ‘social virtues’ or ‘social affections,’ ” as well as the view that religion was an ally and not—as the awful French had it—an enemy. Combine social virtues and religion and you have “benevolence,” “a more modest virtue than Reason, but perhaps a more humane one.” Another term for benevolence? Why, compassionate conservatism, “compassion” being a word that the English had “long before the French” and, being voluntary, that fit in well in the finest moment of the Enlightenment—namely, the creation of America.
All in all, a piffling and pet-peevish book, but sure to provoke merriment in cafes up and down the Champs Elysées.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4236-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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