Engaging history from a talented new scholarly voice.
The riveting story of how economic conservatism became one of the leading strands in American political thought.
Phillips-Fein (History/New York Univ.) follows conservatism from its birth as a big-business reaction to the New Deal to its zenith as a key element of the Reagan Revolution in the early ’80s. She eschews lengthy theoretical discussion of conservatism’s laissez-faire, small-government tenets, focusing instead on the unique individuals behind the movement, beginning with the wealthy du Pont family, who believed that New Deal economic reforms were nothing less than socialism, and eccentric, influential Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who shaped conservatism into a fully formed ideology. During this period, conservatism would largely remain the purview of such big-business associations as the Liberty League and the National Association of Manufacturers, but it wouldn’t remain in backrooms for long. Phillips-Fein profiles the colorful characters who brought conservatism into mainstream popular culture during the ’50s, including National Review editor William F. Buckley and novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand. An extended section on General Electric executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, who expertly used conservative propaganda to help break strikes and achieve political goals, is especially revealing, particularly in the author’s analysis of his hard-right ideology’s influence on GE employee Ronald Reagan. Phillips-Fein ably examines the merging of economic conservatism, anticommunism and religious and moral thought. She details the influence of evangelists like Jerry Falwell, who successfully entwined conservative economic ideology and anticommunism in his version of Protestantism and gained massive popular support. Finally, the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1976 and 1980 show conservatism finally breaking through to the mainstream and becoming part of average citizens’ thinking. Readers may be sorry that the book ends with Reagan’s election. An examination of how conservative ideas shaped American politics in later decades would be most welcome, if executed with the same verve and skill that Phillips-Fein demonstrates here.
Engaging history from a talented new scholarly voice.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05930-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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