Berhman’s sure grasp of the geo-politics, his firm understanding of the Plan’s details and his deft portrayal of the men who...
A splendid narrative history of the Marshall Plan, perhaps the best foreign-policy idea America ever had.
Feeling entitled because of its battlefield sacrifices and driven by a seemingly ascendant Marxist ideology, Stalin’s expansionist Soviet Union saw prostrate Europe as especially vulnerable in the wake of World War II. To counter this threat, the United States conceived a comprehensive recovery program designed to revive the continent’s working economies. Wisely, the plan required European initiative and cooperation to make the aid self-sustaining, with the U.S. acting only as a constructive partner to help restore social conditions where free institutions could flourish. Fatefully, Stalin refused to allow Russia or its Eastern European satellites to participate. Berhman (The Invisible People: How the US Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time, 2004) follows the plan from its infancy in the U.S. State Department, where glittering figures such as the indispensable George Marshall, George Kennan, Robert Lovett and Dean Acheson presided, through its adolescence, where Michigan’s Senator Vandenberg shepherded the European Recovery Program through Congress, to its full maturity in Europe, where W. Averell Harriman, as well as three men insufficiently remembered by history—Will Clayton, Richard Bissell and Paul Hoffman—insured its success. The Plan would have foundered had it not been for European statesmen—England’s Ernest Bevin, France’s Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman and Germany’s Conrad Adenauer—whose leadership and vision not only saved their countries, but also planted the seeds for European integration leading to NATO, the European Common Market and today’s EU. Astonishingly, billions of dollars and four years later, amidst Cold War episodes as unsettling as the Berlin airlift and the outbreak of the Korean War, the Plan had restored Western European confidence, political stability and economic health, and it secured the region as a U.S. partner for the next half century.
Berhman’s sure grasp of the geo-politics, his firm understanding of the Plan’s details and his deft portrayal of the men who made it work combine to forge a remarkable story.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8263-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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