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REBIRTH OF A NATION

THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA, 1877-1920

Large-scale history with an intimate touch.

A cultural historian looks at America’s “age of regeneration” between the end of the Civil War and World War I.

The end of Reconstruction in 1877 also marked the beginning of decades of social and economic upheaval that transformed the nation from a sleepy republic to a world power. From the Civil War’s widespread destruction emerged an intense longing for rebirth. Lears (History/Rutgers Univ.; Something for Nothing: Luck in America, 2003, etc.) presents this struggle between farmers and bankers, workers and industrialists, pacifists and militarists, immigrants and nativists, as a battle for the nation’s soul. During this contentious period the noble Republican Party of Lincoln become the captive of big business, while the old bugaboo of race kept Northern and Southern Democrats from mobilizing an effective opposition. In richly allusive and lively prose, Lears explains how the desire for reconciliation among whites was achieved at the price of equal rights for blacks and a reign of racial terror. He examines how the populist dream of a cooperative commonwealth ultimately yielded to the elite cult of manliness and militarism, the pervasive power of capital and a managerial and political class convinced that the nation’s road to renewal ran through empire. The author’s cast of characters ranges from the unexpected—Harry Houdini, Buffalo Bill—to the predictable array of Gilded Age villains—mainly Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie. Lears clearly sympathizes with the idealists and dreamers determined to wrest meaning from the Civil War’s awful sacrifice. He cites the work and commentary of people like Jane Addams, Mark Twain, William James and Eugene Debs. For him, Teddy Roosevelt was a monster and Woodrow Wilson a tragic figure, overwhelmed by dark forces. Though the author’s take on the era is partisan, readers need not agree with his politics to appreciate the high style and obvious passion he brings to this difficult subject.

Large-scale history with an intimate touch.

Pub Date: June 9, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-06-074749-7

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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