A digressive, unsurprising overview of presidential afterlife.
Former presidents find ways to reinvent themselves.
Five presidents witnessed Donald Trump’s election: George H.W. Bush, his son George, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Journalist Brower, contributor to CNN, Bloomberg News, and CBS News, strains to find commonality among them aside from their inhabiting the Oval Office and refraining from criticizing the men who succeeded them. “Though we hail from different backgrounds and ideologies,” Bush I once remarked, “we’re singularly unique, even eternally bound, by our common devotion and service to this wonderful country.” Despite Bush’s comment, Brower presents no evidence for anything other than “a sense of empathy for each other”—no Team of Five (Four, now that Bush I has died), no Presidents Club, although the past presidents do assemble for events such as a state funeral or the opening of a presidential library. The author’s research included a visit with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, speaking with Laura and Barbara Bush, and sitting for one interview with Donald Trump; she also interviewed more than 100 aides, family members, and White House residence staff. Most anecdotes and gossip, though, seem derived from published news articles, memoirs, and biographies. All reveal the diverse paths these men, and their first ladies, followed once they left the White House. Clinton missed drawing a crowd but soon took to the podium, earning hefty speaking fees. The Obamas vacationed lavishly and received huge advances for their memoirs. The Carters devoted themselves to their philanthropic Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity. Brower includes Truman, Nixon, Ford, and LBJ in her purview as well. Among the topics she considers: how each presidential family handled the transition to and from the White House, redecorated their new homes, dealt with the “astronomical” cost of presidential libraries, prepared or sheltered their children from being in the public eye, and reacted to Trump’s strident criticism.
A digressive, unsurprising overview of presidential afterlife. (two 8-page color inserts)Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-266897-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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