A veteran correspondent's bleak appraisal of the state of the European Union on the eve of a new millennium. Drawing largely on his own reportage and on statistical data, Newhouse (War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 1988, etc.) reviews the many ways in which the alliance founded in 1957 as the Common Market has been marking time rather than advancing during the postCold War era. For example, citing the emergence of economic powerhouses at the local level (which stoutly resist the regulatory excesses of bureaucratic Brussels), he speculates that the EU could one day resemble the Hanseatic League to the extent that it was comprised of semiautonomous regions (Bavaria, Spanish Catalonia, northern Italy, et al.) rather than nation-states. The author (now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution) goes on to assess the obstacles still impeding the integration of East and West Germany, the reluctance of Paris to accept the dominion of Berlin in continental affairs, and the oddly disinterested role played by the UK in the confederation's business. Covered as well are the 15- member coalition's hesitancy to acknowledge that expansion (not a chimerical monetary union) is job number one; the comparatively low priority accorded security; the cultural differences that continue to divide a putatively united Europe; and the reality (confirmed by the area's inability to respond decisively to conflicts in the Balkans) that America remains Europe's keeper—and its pre-eminent power. Newhouse also casts a cold eye on Germany's disinclination to provide an errant Europe with either entrepreneurial or political direction, and the impact of recent elections (in France, the UK, and elsewhere) on the ruinously expensive welfare policies of most member nations. An illuminating audit of the credits and debits amassed by the decidedly strange bedfellows constituting today's EU. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43370-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
