We’ll see, come 2004. In the meanwhile, a useful primer.
Right in time for the 2004 campaign: a sprawling, capable history of a party that, like its opposition (see Lewis Gould’s Grand Old Party, above), has long had trouble deciding just what its politics are.
Baltimore Sun columnist Witcover (No Way to Pick a President, 1999, etc.), a seasoned newsman, knows a human-interest story when he sees it, and his account of the Dems’ long history is full of juicy tidbits, from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton—against whom the current crop of presidential hopefuls seems decidedly colorless. Witcover has a little trouble deciding just when Democratic history begins, and he locates the party’s origins in several strains, often conflicting, within the federalist-antifederalist debates of the early Republic. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton grumbled that the proto-Democrats of 1800 were set to “lead a Revolution after the manner of Bonaparte” and were “hostile to the system” of “general [centralized] government”—which puts them about where the Republicans are today. When Jefferson famously said that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists,” Witcover remarks, he was speaking not so much to a spirit of unity as to “a general erosion of firm ideological positions” following George Washington’s quasi-aristocratic reign; that erosion bred a provisional sort of politics, which perhaps explains why later generations of 19th-century activists could call themselves Democrats and be here proslavery, there ardent abolitionists, here all for civil war on behalf of either North or South, there champions of peace. Much of the long-standing equation of Democratic with “mob” rule, Witcover writes, traces to the era of Andrew Jackson, who was convinced that “mercantile considerations were a peril to the country”; whence, too, the equally long-standing notion that Democrats are anti-business. And so on to the present, where the Democratic Party, as two hundred years ago, represents an uneasy alliance, with some, Witcover writes in conclusion, arguing that it should “return to its roots,” others that it eschew “the old confrontational class warfare in favor of a new, enlightened and pragmatic partnership between toilers and entrepreneurs in an era of massive technological and informational change.”
We’ll see, come 2004. In the meanwhile, a useful primer.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50742-6
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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