Sturdy economic history with a heavy dash of social criticism—and, as many conservative critics have said before of...
“Laissez-faire is a pretense,” writes post-conservative pundit Phillips (The Cousins’ Wars, 1999, etc.). “Government power and preferment have been used by the rich, not shunned.” In other words, in this country, the rich not only get richer, they also get more privileged.
As a polity, Americans tend to indulge the affluent, imagining that somehow their wealth will trickle down to the less fortunate. The reality is, notes Phillips, “painful disparities—working to the detriment of ordinary people who rarely understand what is happening or why—have been the historical rule, and not the unfortunate exception.” American politicians traditionally have been more than indulgent, allowing the rich to accrue all sorts of political favors, evade taxes and duties, and live at a far remove from the rest of society: witness recent giveaways in the current administration’s tax reforms. Politicians and commoners alike have been deluded by a false sense of participation in the system and the false promise of a level playing field, but the fact that 48 percent of Americans held some stock in the year 2000 speaks less, Phillips argues, than the fact that 90 percent of the earnings growth in the last two decades has gone into the pockets of the top 1 percent of our society. His sense of moral outrage over this fundamentally undemocratic gulf, a potential seedbed for true class warfare, is well placed and effective, though it may surprise readers who remember him as a conservative advisor to the Nixon administration. Even more valuable, however, is Phillips’s careful analysis of the political boom-and-bust cycles in American history whereby Republican administrations help send aloft speculative bubbles that upon bursting, as all bubbles must, prompt spurts of progressive reform that curb—if only briefly—the power and public appetites of the wealthy.
Sturdy economic history with a heavy dash of social criticism—and, as many conservative critics have said before of Phillips, excellent ammunition for liberals.Pub Date: May 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0533-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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