A jeremiad more fitting to 1967 than 2007.
A ham-fisted effort to wound liberal sensibilities—or shoot fish in a barrel.
It’s not as if Ann Coulter took a slug of orange juice and a Ritalin and set her sights on the unfortunate Golden State. Cashill (Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream, 2006, etc.) is more intelligent and sophisticated than that, though there are moments when readers will wonder whether he doesn’t really believe that all Californians are many-times divorced, meth-addled, welfare-cheating or trust-fund layabouts. Granted that California makes an easy target: Satirists from Bret Harte to Cyra McFadden on down have made nice livings pointing out as much. But is John Holmes, the late porn star, really an exemplar of the San Fernando Valley? And granted that Susan Atkins was one of the weirder of the supremely weird people who flocked around Charlie Manson, that the Crips have been performing their mayhem since that annus mansonius 1969 and that Scientologists are spectacularly strange in their own way. But are they really the norm in California? No. For every Tookie Williams there’s a Merle Haggard. Cashill takes at least formal inspiration from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004)—save that he misses the point of Frank’s inquiry, which was why Kansas, with its liberal and even radical tradition, should have turned its back and gone right-wing. California has turned out some notable righties, of course, but its political and social traditions have always been so diverse as to defy categorization. Yet Cashill seems to believe that the wealthy of, say, Marin County should be voting for Bush rather than doing what he claims they do, which is to “wander among the ruins of their imagined paradise and persist in blaming some greedy ‘other’ for its demise,” while Hollywood types should be going to church like good Americans rather than filling their lives with “everything from est to self-actualization to the I Ching.” And so on.
A jeremiad more fitting to 1967 than 2007.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3102-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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