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 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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