We came to Washington as outsiders and never appreciably changed this status." (When Bert Lance was under attack, no one rallied round.) He discussed virtually everything with Rosalynn, who had "strong opinions of her own." (Out of one of their discussions came the Camp David peace initiative.) "It seemed that Congress had an insatiable desire for consultation, which, despite all our efforts, we were never able to meet." (But—ruefully—to gain Senator Hayakawa's support for the Panama Canal treaties, Carter read his book on semantics overnight and promised to consult him on Africa.) . . . Altogether, Carter's report on his presidency is an unsurprising amalgam of folksiness, methodical notetaking, and selective recollection. The high point is his daily log of the Camp David negotiations, which also brings a shrewd, "thankful" observation on the two principals' contrasting styles: "In Sadat's case, the leader was much more forthcoming than his chief advisers, and in Begin's case, the advisers were much more inclined to work out difficult problems than their leader." ("I would draft a proposal I considered reasonable, take it to Sadat for quick approval, and then spend hours or days working on the same point with the Israeli delegation.") The struggle for ratification of the Panama Canal treaties is tellingly detailed as welL On human rights, on energy, on Salt II, Carter restates his positions and attempts to rebut criticism. He is regretful that he compromised at all on the water projects; caustic generally about "special interest lobbies'; critical of Kennedy on health insurance; sorry that the cabinet firings weren't handled better; and supportive of brother Billy. Except for a late, election-year reference to inflation, he has nothing to say about the economy. As regards the hostage crisis—including the decision to adroit the Shah—he is far less candid than Hamilton Jordan. (Pre-crisis, there's some pique at US ambassador Sullivan's divergent stance.) If anything, Carter seems indeed to have been out-of-his-element—conscious of how his background differed from House leader Tip O'Neill's, for instance, and reliant on family socializing to bridge the gap. lt's straightforwardly informative, in an unexciting way—and obliquely revealing.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1982
ISBN: 1557283303
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1982
IN THE NEWS
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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