A brief cultural history, written by a mainstream liberal, that describes radicalism, home-grown style, over the last hundred years. Expanding his The American Left in the Twentieth Century (1973), Diggins (History/CUNY Graduate Center; The Proud Decades, 1988, etc.) focuses on the resemblances and differences among four movements that have characterized the American left: the ``Lyrical Left,'' centered around Greenwich Village in the WW I era; the ``Old Left'' of the Depression; the ``New Left'' of the Sixties; and the latter's strange afterlife as the ``Academic Left'' of today. Although the first three movements were marked by generational discontinuities from those preceding or following them, each ``erupted in a fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history.'' Ironically, Diggins points out, now that it has succeeded in entrenching itself into the universities it once scorned, the Academic Left has become enamored of such approaches as deconstructionism—leaving it impotent, he believes, in the one area from which it traditionally gained strength: knowledge. As a result, it is left with ``no political significance but considerable educational significance, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young.'' It is no accident that this discussion lacks the liveliness of Diggins's earlier ones, which rely heavily on seminal histories of American Communism and the New Left written by Theodore Draper, Daniel Aaron, Todd Gitlin, and James Miller. There, on more comfortable ground, Diggins indulges his gift for pungent, pithy description (e.g., Michael Harrington, whose The Other America sparked the War on Poverty, was a ``Catholic with a bad conscience and a good heart''), while sketching vivid profiles of Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and the philosopher who inspired all four movements, John Dewey. A concise analysis of what has animated the American radical impulse. (B&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03075-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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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