Not much to surprise politically aware readers, but a solid appeal to small-r republican virtues and an altogether readable...
A gimlet-eyed look at the mean corridors of power in Washington, with a welcome reminder that this, too, shall—might?—pass.
How did we arrive at our current appalling state of affairs, politically speaking? There are many ingredients in that particular stew, writes Washington Post political blogger Sargent. There’s the free-floating rage that has descended on the land, encouraging what the author calls “thunderdome politics,” the decline of the political conversation into some sort of degenerate blood sport that may be amusing to a few but that drives away others who should be participating. There’s gerrymandering and, with it, vote suppression and what Sargent calls “vote wasting”—and if readers are unclear about how those things work, the author’s explanation is crystal-clear, if alarming. There are the sitting president’s attacks on democratic institutions and his clear autocratic tendencies, all enabled by a weak congressional cohort and a host of willing sycophants. “The GOP Congress,” writes Sargent with nice thunder, “largely remains Trump’s faithful enabler, effectively shielding his corruption from public scrutiny and accountability, and actively aiding and abetting his efforts to undermine the independence of law enforcement in the quest to avoid scrutiny and accountability.” And then there’s the president’s constant lying, a trope that turns up again and again in these pages, as if we should somehow be surprised by it after all this time. The recitation might be tiresome if Sargent had not ventured some counterpunches, including his useful suggestion that, given their supposed status as enemies, journalists and publications should band together in resistance and “redouble their commitment” to core democratic values. Throughout, Sargent reassures readers that we’ve seen worse and lived to tell the tale and that "there are reasons to be optimistic that our institutions are, while battered and black-eyed, largely holding up in the face of Trump’s degradations.”
Not much to surprise politically aware readers, but a solid appeal to small-r republican virtues and an altogether readable polemic.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269845-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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