A timely subject gets a treatment at times too clever for its own good.
A lighthearted romp through several centuries of cheating at popular American pursuits.
Cheating isn’t what it used to be, argues historian Fenster (Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation, 2016 etc.) in this quirky dishonor roll of cheaters from the Colonial era to the present. Americans blithely tolerate lapses their forebears might have condemned. “The abandonment of the stigma against cheaters is a trend in our times across every pursuit,” writes the author. With a wit that ranges from deadpan to sardonic, Fenster shows how “cheating has found a comfortable place” in fields that include politics, business, higher education, bridge tournaments, and NASCAR races. Consider the Kansas biology teacher who, after discovering in 2001 that 28 of her students had plagiarized work for a project, gave them all zeroes, which effectively left them failing the course; the principal supported her, but parents protested, and the school board ordered her to pass all but one of the cheaters. Compare the young plagiarists’ get-out-of-jail-free card with punishments faced by cheaters of yesteryear: the producers of the rigged 1950s game show The $64,000 Question, investigated by the government, or runner Rosie Ruiz, stripped of her title after faking a victory in the women’s division 1980 Boston Marathon. Fenster ascribes the destigmatizing of cheating in part to the waning moral influence of elders like grandparents—“America should have thought of that when it traded in ancestor worship for descendant worship”—and tarts up the history with devices like a twee self-interview and a California marriage counselor’s “Test to Identify Chronic Cheaters and Whether a Spouse Who Has Strayed Will Do So Again.” There are also digressions into topics such as the author’s golf game (at times “I shoot a neat 67—per hole”). The flippant tone of much of this book—entertaining as it can be—is often at odds with its serious and well-taken points about the normalization of cheating in America.
A timely subject gets a treatment at times too clever for its own good.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2870-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
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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