A vigorous account of an influential American life.
A cradle-to-grave biography of the U.S. Supreme Court's longest-serving chief justice.
Independent scholar Unger (John Quincy Adams, 2012, etc.) treats the influential John Marshall (1755-1835) as a hero. He was a distinguished officer and an effective state leader in Virginia before studying law and being appointed to the Supreme Court at the beginning of the 19th century. Marshall would serve as chief justice for 35 years (a record tenure), establish the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and write decisions that solidified the primacy of the federal government over often resentful state governments. During Marshall's tenure on the court, the justices handed down nearly 1,200 rulings; Marshall served as the lead writer for more than 500 of those. His opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) set a precedent, never enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, that the Supreme Court possessed the power to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Since the court employed no police force, concern arose that its unpopular rulings would be ignored or would at least be unenforceable. Through his authoritative demeanor and easy way with his colleagues and others, Marshall exuded credibility, which in turn encouraged U.S. presidents to send federal troops if needed to enforce rulings. Unger chooses to present all aspects of Marshall's life, including his military heroism and his extraordinary devotion to a chronically ill wife and their children. As a result, Marshall's Supreme Court appointment does not occur until halfway through the biography. Though the narrative sometimes veers toward hagiography, it is well-researched, and the author is skilled at portraying the characters and viewpoints of Marshall's political friends and foes. Thomas Jefferson comes across as a stubborn, politically motivated and sometimes hypocritical man, and Unger employs the Marshall-Jefferson enmity effectively, adding tension to the narrative.
A vigorous account of an influential American life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82220-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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