An important book that warrants a place at the forefront of Prohibition histories. General readers will love it, and...
The surprising ways in which a failed social experiment helped shape modern America.
In this splendid social and political history, McGirr (History/Harvard Univ.; Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 2001, etc.) offers a vivid account of Prohibition (1920-1933) and its “significant but largely unacknowledged” long-term effects on the United States. Writing with authority and admirable economy, the author traces the decadelong effort to discipline the leisure of urban immigrants, led by Protestant clergyman driven by “a powerful animosity toward working-class drinking in the saloon.” With support from temperance groups and businessmen (“Until booze is banished we can never have really efficient workmen,” said one manufacturer), the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages not only gave rise to the familiar Prohibition story of bootlegging, violence, and speak-easies but also had diverse, wide-ranging consequences that resonate to this day. Drawing on archival research, McGirr shows most importantly how the war on alcohol greatly expanded the role of the federal government, especially with regard to policing and surveillance. Prohibition awakened the nation’s religious right, spurred the electoral realignment that resulted in the New Deal, and served as a “cultural accelerant” that began with the emergence of urban nightlife and drinking by women and youths and spread “ideals of self-fulfillment, pleasure, and liberation” across the country. These and other perceptive insights are contained in a bright, taut narrative that covers everything from the growing popularity of jazz to the selective enforcement of Prohibition in places from Chicago to Virginia to the tenor of everyday American life in these years. McGirr’s discussions of the class aspects of the “dry” crusade will leave many feeling that booze—and the supposed criminality of the saloon—was the least of the problems.
An important book that warrants a place at the forefront of Prohibition histories. General readers will love it, and scholars will find much to ponder.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-06695-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
