A smart, lively political history that illuminates the changing relations of two decidedly unequal partners.
The ghost of Winston Churchill looms large over the world—and no one’s paying much attention.
Is it affection or mutual desperation that fuels the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.? Dutch-born journalist Buruma ponders the question as he considers the fallen fortunes of that relationship, which Churchill famously proclaimed while delivering his “Iron Curtain” speech after being voted out of office at the end of World War II. “Since then,” writes the author, “despite Churchill’s mythical spirit living on in the White House, the Anglo-American relationship has been more special in London than in Washington.” Indeed, even while he worked closely with Franklin Roosevelt to build the Western Alliance, Churchill found that the interests of the U.S. often diverged from his own. For instance, where Churchill labored long and hard to hold the British Empire together, Roosevelt and his lieutenants publicly advocated the independence of India and other colonies. That independence came, the British Empire dissolved, and Britain became a grudgingly European nation. Meanwhile, Buruma notes, where the U.S. and the U.K. were “once regarded as models of openness, liberalism, and generosity,” both nations have become illiberal, nationalistic, and mean-spirited. “Trump, Farage, and the more rabid Tory Brexiteers,” writes the author, “spoke obsessively about taking back their countries and making them great again. This talk was either grandiose—Britain as a great global power—or reflected a narrow, chauvinistic view of the world that Roosevelt and Churchill would have found abhorrent.” This situation has left it to Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to remind both nations of how democratic nations are supposed to behave. Buruma also astutely examines the relationships of each British leader after Churchill with their American counterpart, almost always a one-sided exchange that not even Beatlemania could even out.
A smart, lively political history that illuminates the changing relations of two decidedly unequal partners.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52220-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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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