A well-sung paean to the generation that took to the streets and demanded a different definition of truth, justice and the...
Stand up, Boomers! No more guilt about those non-fat lattes and BlackBerries. You’ve made America a better country.
Steinhorn (Communications/American Univ.) has had enough. All that romantic braying about “the greatest generation” annoys him, and he replies with a sturdy, often convincing defense of his own Boomer generation. He points out that the WWII generation, having defeated fascism and imperialism, returned to the United States eager to maintain the pre-war status quo, the one of racial segregation, sexism, closed political institutions and white-bread values. It was the Boomers, Steinhorn argues, who changed all that, who’ve made America a more open, diverse, environmentally aware, egalitarian society. And they get only disrespect and sarcasm from the media and, especially, from conservative critics. Steinhorn’s great accomplishment is to show how Boomer values have indeed permeated the culture. Although political positions may seem polarized in the country today, he says, there are few who really wish to return to 1950s sorts of social arrangements. Most people want a cleaner environment, more transparency in government, a friendlier workplace, a more skeptical press, respect for minority rights—things that the Boomers began insisting upon when they came of age in the ’60s. After exploring the Boomer influence on various aspects of the culture (women’s rights, diversity, religion, environment, higher education), he ends by offering some challenges to the Boomers as they enter their twilight years. In his enthusiasm, he occasionally looks foolish—as when he blames the Boomer love-affair with SUVs on . . . their parents.
A well-sung paean to the generation that took to the streets and demanded a different definition of truth, justice and the American way.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32640-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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