In a 1962 spoof for Esquire, Richard Rovere quoted John Kenneth Galbraith as deeming John J. McCloy ``chairman of the US Establishment''—but McCloy has never been the subject of a full- dress biography. Here, Bird (a contributing editor of The Nation) fills this void with an evenhanded and wonderfully readable account of the public man that also sheds light on the meritocracy whose dedication to principles beyond partisanship still gives it incalculable influence over a presumptively democratic polity. An ambitious, industrious overachiever who made his way from the wrong side of the tracks in Philadelphia through Amherst and Harvard Law School to international eminence, McCloy was notable more for analytic acuity than great brilliance. The upwardly mobile attorney nonetheless left his mark wherever he went. During WW II, for example, the globe-trotting McCloy was Henry Stimson's top aide at the War Department. He later headed the World Bank during its formative years and was High Commissioner of occupied Germany, moving on to the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan. Though a staunch Republican, he served as an advisor to JFK, LBJ, and their successors, while remaining a leading light of the Council on Foreign Relations—an establishment citadel if ever there was one. Although a pillar of rectitude, the pragmatic McCloy did not eschew expedients. He played a key role in the internment of Japanese- Americans after Pearl Harbor, for instance, and granted clemency to scores of convicted Nazis during his tenure in Berlin. When he died early in 1989, a few weeks short of 94, however, McCloy was fittingly eulogized for his substantive contributions to the public good. An impressive narrative history that records a consequential individual's shortcomings without tarnishing his accomplishments. Despite a paucity of personal detail, the absorbing text (ten years in preparation) will likely be the definitive life story for decades to come.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-45415-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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.
