Rewarding reading for serious students of history.
A rallying cry in favor of historians who, revisiting past subjects, change their minds.
All history responsibly practiced, writes Banner—a former professor at Princeton and founder of the National History Center of the American Historical Association—is properly revisionist, acknowledging that “historians’ understanding of major subjects have almost never stood still.” That understanding runs athwart of some readers and interpreters of history—e.g., Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for one, who remarked that he was going to spend a summer reading about the history of slavery, but “not the ‘revisionists.’ ” It is the revisionists, however, who have given us the modern and prevailing view that the Civil War was fought less over states’ rights than over slavery. That view morphed through the “Lost Cause” theories of the Southern agrarians, which “were by no means out of keeping with the general conservative intellectual mood of much of the country,” and the anti-capitalist leanings of Charles and Mary Beard, whose book, The Rise of American Civilization, was required reading a century ago. Historians today give primacy to slavery while allowing “many other, less fundamental immediate triggers of the conflict” to the roster. Other topics of revisionist dissection include the French Revolution, which has been attributed to “monarchical despotism” and “an aroused working class” alike; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, viewed as both necessary in saving the lives of American soldiers and ending World War II and as a horrific and racist act that is essentially indefensible. With a nod to the distant past, Banner contrasts the historiographic leanings of Herodotus and Thucydides, the former a storyteller who crafted grand moral tales about the struggle between Eastern tyranny and Western democracy, the latter “someone caught up in the events he sought to understand.” In clear, occasionally dry prose, Banner, who has been teaching and writing history for more than five decades, capably defends a method that turns on “fidelity to fact and independence of judgment.”
Rewarding reading for serious students of history.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-23845-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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