A richly sourced and meticulous—albeit Nixon-centric—case for why January 1973 matters.
What was so special about January 1973? Robenalt (The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War, 2009, etc.) makes the bold claim that this month signaled a turning point in the history of American political life.
The author focuses on the convergence of three major events: the first Watergate trial, which led to the unraveling of the Nixon Administration; the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, intended to end the war in Vietnam; and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions to protect a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. His persuasive if somewhat self-evident argument, mostly confined to the book’s introduction and epilogue, is that one vision of America, based on Cold War hubris abroad and the welfare state at home, died in the first month of 1973. In its place arose the “Nixon counterrevolution,” giving new shape to conservatism as a political force and poisoning the body politic with new strains of mean-spiritedness and (after Roe v. Wade) religious mania. For the bulk of the book, however, Robenalt keeps his argument subdued and offers a straightforward account of the month’s events, as though he were presenting evidence in a case. He makes ample use of the Nixon tapes, diaries, and other primary sources, but the results can be overly detailed, even tediously quotidian. Things get interesting, though, when Nixon takes the stage, playing the central role. Fresh off his re-election, Nixon was by turns erratic, devious, repellent, sympathetic, lonesome, and drunk. But he is always fascinating in Robenalt’s unvarnished portrait of a flawed leader grappling with momentous events and heading, ultimately, toward ruin. This immersive microhistory offers macro conclusions about American politics.
A richly sourced and meticulous—albeit Nixon-centric—case for why January 1973 matters.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61374-965-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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