The president’s supporters and, really, all political junkies will love this. Republicans, not so much.
A veteran author, journalist and commentator chronicles the campaign that assured President Barack Obama a second term and cemented a consensus among Americans stretching back to the New Deal.
The 2012 election was neither the referendum on the president and the ailing economy as the GOP had hoped, nor simply a choice between the president and his opponent as Obama had wished. Rather, Bloomberg View columnist Alter (The Promise: President Obama, Year One, 2011, etc.) insists, it was a judgment on the Republicans and their mean-spirited billionaire backers, right-wing media cheerleaders, proponents of voter suppression and “clown car” of primary candidates. As he explores the many infirmities and outrages of the president’s opponents and details Obama’s many virtues, it’s clear that, for the author, the “center” of our politics lies decidedly to the left. This obvious bias impairs his analysis throughout, prompting him too often to offer opinion and speculation as fact. For example, he insists the vitriol directed toward the president exceeds anything in our recent history and claims that the president’s contempt for his opponent accounted for his lackluster first debate performance. He goes so far as to wonder if maybe the president threw the debate “because he wanted the game to be a little more challenging?” When he sticks to straight reporting, however, Alter shines. In always fluid, sometimes arresting prose, he tells the inside story of the bartender who surreptitiously taped Romney’s infamous 47 percent remark, offers sharp miniportraits of numerous campaign operatives, and brilliantly deconstructs the “Big Data” component of Obama’s Chicago headquarters, describing their technological innovations and smooth manipulation of social media that set a new standard for future campaigns.
The president’s supporters and, really, all political junkies will love this. Republicans, not so much.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4607-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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