A careful, circumstantial study that compares favorably to Theodore H. White’s presidents series and that politics junkies...
An excellent account of the 1968 presidential race, a political season of spoilers, outsiders, and broken machines eerily like our own time.
It makes for a fascinating thought experiment to imagine what might have become of America and the world had Robert F. Kennedy been elected president in 1968. He was, after all, the only Democrat who could “beat President Johnson, and then beat any Republican”—good reason, as MSNBC political commentator O’Donnell (Deadly Force: The True Story of How a Badge Can Become a License to Kill, 1983) recounts in this sharp, nuanced account of the election cycle, for Democratic leaders to press an initially reluctant Kennedy to run. When they did, they effectively betrayed party stalwart Eugene McCarthy, whose “legions of antiwar student supporters were sounding angry at the possibility of Bobby trying to steal Gene’s thunder” and who distinguished himself as an “antiwar candidate credibly challenging a war-making president.” But Kennedy was assassinated, the Democratic Party splintered into liberal and conservative wings, and Richard Nixon maneuvered his way to the Republican candidacy past a green but definitely interested Ronald Reagan, who had “won the governorship [of California] by beating the man who beat Richard Nixon for the governorship.” Nixon was helped along by an emerging TV executive named Roger Ailes, who would soon perfect a brand of yellow journalism that runs strong today and who recognized that “the most powerful force blocking Nixon’s path to the White House was television,” with its remorseless attention to darting eyes, mutters, and five o’clock shadows. Notes O’Donnell, “Ailes became more influential in Republican politics than Nixon ever was,” giving the 1968 campaign a dimension of continuing influence—for if no Nixon, then no Trump, who shares with the disgraced president more than unprecedentedly huge armies of protestors at their respective inaugurations.
A careful, circumstantial study that compares favorably to Theodore H. White’s presidents series and that politics junkies will find irresistible.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56314-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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