From the recently, tragically deceased author of Common Ground (1985), a brilliant but flawed portrait of class warfare in early- 20th-century America. Two-time Pulitzer awardee Lukas's ostensible subject is the 1905 assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg and the subsequent trial of three officials of the Western Federation of Miners, accused of ordering Steunenberg's death in retaliation for his role in the military suppression of a violent 1899 strike in Idaho's Coeur d'Alenes mining district. This is merely a jumping off point, however, for a ramble through the thickets of America's industrial, political, social, and cultural structures at the turn of the century. When Pinkerton operative James McParland (one of the book's many titanic personalities) emerges as a key player in the prosecution's efforts to convict William Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, Lukas pauses to recap the history of private detective agencies—in England as well as America. When Clarence Darrow enters as a defense attorney, we get 28 pages of biography before rejoining his clients in Idaho. The story of the army regiment that put down the Coeur d'Alenes unrest; the character and career of each major reporter covering the trial; the fractures within the Socialist Party—Lukas crams all this and much more into a massive, unwieldy text. Many of the digressions are fascinating, all of them showcase the author's superb analytic gifts and powerful prose, but Lukas fails to distinguish the relevant from the merely intriguing. The background material unquestionably gives depth to the book's grim depiction of a nation enmeshed in virtual civil war, with capital and labor equally willing to employ unsavory tactics and the government almost always on the side of the big boys. Without the aid of a coherent story line, however, the narrative ultimately suffocates in excessive detail. Provocative, maddening, deeply disturbing—a fitting epitaph for a man who in everything he wrote asked Americans to look at their nation's unvarnished reality. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80858-7
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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