A thoughtful consideration of Washington’s wisdom that couldn’t be timelier.
Why George Washington’s last message proves apposite to our own time.
After two terms as America’s first president, Washington bid farewell by publishing in a daily newspaper a long, heartfelt address, warning his countrymen about the forces that could threaten democracy. Editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast and former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani, Avlon (Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, 2010, etc.) analyzes that address and other of Washington’s writings to create a vivid portrait of the struggles that marked the nation’s early years. Washington had been a reluctant first president, but his experiences as an army commander served him well as a peacetime strategist facing dissension among the prickly, squabbling members of his administration. Admired as a general, he was “pilloried” as president and saw the rise of opposing political parties, something the Founding Fathers had not foreseen. “There was an idealistic assumption among the founders,” writes the author, “that elected representatives would reason together as individuals.” Washington clearly saw the perils that the nation still faces: he believed that “partisan impulses needed to be restrained by a wise and vigilant citizenry” or risk the rise of demagogues. Liberal education was vital to an enlightened population who could participate responsibly in civic matters. He worried that self-interest and regional, rather than national, identity could lead to disunity. Citizens needed to recognize the benefits of a central government that provided “equal laws and equal protection.” That protection extended to religion, ensuring pluralism so that no sect would “degenerate into a political faction.” As for foreign policy, Washington advised independence but not isolationism. Avlon engagingly traces the afterlife of the address, showing how subsequent presidents cherry-picked ideas consistent with their own political views. He argues persuasively that the document deserves the serious reading that he offers. “Armed with a sense of perspective,” he writes, “we can take some comfort that our domestic divisions too shall pass.”
A thoughtful consideration of Washington’s wisdom that couldn’t be timelier.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4646-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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