A delightful look at the last century-turning year. This book represents a good idea. The question of whether a century begins with a year ending in zero or one means that we get to celebrate the beginning of a new hundred-year cycle twice, and the interim period between New Year’s Days takes on a special significance for calendar watchers. Crichton, award-winning executive producer of PBS’s The American Experience, tracks the year 1900 on a month-by-month basis, weaving together stories of individuals and events, high drama and mundane life. Some phenomena span the entire year, notably the presidential election and the early stages of the Philippine insurrection; in both cases our knowledge of future tragedy makes the description more poignant. In politics we see not only the major milestones—party conventions and election day—but also the strain of the campaign on Bryan and Roosevelt, the leisured approach of McKinley, and the back room power plays. Some phenomena provide dramatic moments in time, notably the multinational effort to rescue besieged Westerners in Peking during the Boxer rebellion and the coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania. Events of varying levels of meaning—the Paris Exposition, the Harvard-Yale football game, the deal between Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan that created US Steel—along with the activities of varying individuals—Jack London, Paul Dunbar, and Theodore Roosevelt—are recounted in the context of the life of the age. Crichton keeps us focused on 1900 throughout, eschewing the temptation to continually draw lessons for the future, yet it is impossible to avoid thinking about whether that year’s trauma and triumph, corruption and character, would be preferable to our own. Somehow a president’s sexual dalliances seem comparatively superficial. Then again, we are not yet to the year 2000. An extremely enjoyable account. (100 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5365-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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