Lively and well-grounded, offering good measures by which to judge our best and worst presidents and their methods of...
“Few leaders are impeached or assassinated; most die from a thousand cuts”: an illuminating look at the highest office in the land and its occupants.
When the Founding Fathers first wrestled with how to organize a government, writes Suri (Chair, Leadership in Global Affairs, Univ. of Texas; Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama, 2011, etc.), they quickly ascertained that the country “required central leadership that could unify competing interest groups without simultaneously denying their freedom.” That leadership was much stronger than the Articles of Confederation envisioned, yet, thanks to a carefully considered system of checks and balances, not tyrannical. Fortunately, the first president was George Washington, who, in the author’s view, “defined presidential authority as knowledge and trust-based.” The president knew things that were unavailable to ordinary citizens, who in turn had to place their trust in him to represent their interests. Theodore Roosevelt, by contrast, considered himself a kind of dictator or elected king, if a benevolent one who exemplified the progressive notion that smart and vigorous men “could improve a messy democratic process” by taking care of details best left unavailable to ordinary folks. Subsequent presidents have fallen somewhere between the models provided by those two presidents, if not outside them. Ronald Reagan, for instance, shunned the micromanagerial ways of Lyndon Johnson, with the ironic result that his administration was characterized by “policy indiscipline—too many interventions without careful strategic consideration.” On that note, Suri opines that the best use of presidential power is to confine it to a limited set of military, political, and economic objectives, even while noting that presidential power has grown so substantially in the post–World War II era that the office invites redefinition, inasmuch as “democratic leadership requires a vibrant fact-based public sphere, and trusted anchors for informed policy discussions”—things that are notable today for their apparent absence.
Lively and well-grounded, offering good measures by which to judge our best and worst presidents and their methods of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-05173-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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