Good reading, especially for students of political culture and early American history.
Sex-tinged scandals, political mudslinging, sectarian division, tabloid exposés: Bill Clinton may have had a bad time, but the Founding Fathers had it worse.
Freeman (History/Yale) opens her lucid study of early American politics with an anecdote. Arguing before a hostile crowd to defend the Jay Treaty of 1795, Alexander Hamilton was beaned by a rock. The bleeding Federalist left the podium only to encounter a Republican opponent and, after an exchange of angry words, challenge him to a duel. Rebuffed, Hamilton challenged the next group of Republicans he met to a fistfight; one of them responded with an offer to duel with pistols. The events of that summer day were by no means unusual, Freeman writes. Governed by a class-bound code of honor, the revolutionary generation regarded political contests as personal ones; they were quick to take offense and quick to fight. Early American politics, she maintains, was a rough-and-tumble affair of wounded egos and hurt pride that can be understood only in the context of this “honor culture,” which had rules we moderns can scarcely comprehend. “There was an emotional logic to [early politicians’] actions and reactions that is apparent only in the context of their time,” Freeman notes, adding, “Of course, logical decisions can be bad decisions.” Among the many she chronicles are the vicious wars Thomas Jefferson waged in print on his many opponents (including sometime friend John Adams), the duel that left Hamilton dead and opponent Aaron Burr disgraced, and the vituperative presidential election of 1800, during which, a Republican recalled, a Federalist was “insolent enough to dictate to me that tho’ he esteemed me as a Man, yet we must all be crushed and that my life was of little Importance when compared to the peace of the State.” To judge by Freeman’s vivid anecdotes and smart analysis, it’s a wonder the republic survived the Founders.
Good reading, especially for students of political culture and early American history.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08877-9
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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