If you’re inclined to disbelieve the official record, Brady’s book, less than definitive but more than circumstantial, will...
Britain-based American novelist Brady (The Blue Death, 2012, etc.) offers an unusual perspective on Alger Hiss (1904-1996), the aristocrat reduced to traveling salesman.
As a young ballet dancer in New York in 1960, the author was about to marry a much older man (“fortunately nobody in the company cared about the oddities of my private life”) who was the director of the organization that published Consumer Reports. Enter Hiss, a paper salesman after having served several years in prison for perjury; he didn’t land the account, but he found good friends in the couple. All these years later, Brady serves up a nice defense of Hiss, who she believes was not guilty of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union—but who she also believes was essentially framed by Richard Nixon, then making a name for himself as a staffer on the House Un-American Activities Committee. That allegation is not new—Victor Navasky, among others, has leveled it before—but Brady has a crime writer’s knack for ferreting out multiple lines of investigation, noting irregularities in the material evidence—e.g., a missing typewriter, a mimeograph machine capable of concocting false witness in the wrong hands—and in the documentary record, including files kept by Soviet intelligence. But she also allows that Hiss, the sort of man Nixon would have despised as well-connected, cultured, and effete, walked into some of the traps set by the prosecution, in part because he simply couldn’t believe that anyone would accuse a good public servant of wrongdoing. Brady writes with hard-boiled verve (“Hoover knew all about it. The FBI knew all about it. Freedom of Information reveals many FBI memos worried about it”) that occasionally hardens into ham-fistedness. Readers risk a little level-of-diction whiplash but to a useful end.
If you’re inclined to disbelieve the official record, Brady’s book, less than definitive but more than circumstantial, will confirm your view.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-711-1
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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