In this brief yet vigorous broadside, Kalb concludes that the media must shoulder the burden of checking the authoritarian...
The press is the enemy of the people? No, writes veteran journalist Kalb (Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War, 2015, etc.): That’s just another presidential projection.
In a sense, the free press is its own defense as a guarantor of a free society. But only in a sense, and it has frequently come under attack, especially under the administrations of Richard Nixon and now Donald Trump. Of the latter, the author, now associated with the Brookings Institution, confesses to not having taken him seriously, adding, “and when I did, finally, it was too late.” Trump constantly attacks the press as the ocean attacks the beach, gnawing away at it so when journalists present evidence of his bad behavior, he can brush it away. Ironically, as Kalb notes, an early master of this strategy was Democratic advance man Pat Caddell, who worked for Jimmy Carter before going over to the Breitbart side of the force and pushing the thesis that the press was an instrument of the elite—and worse yet, “the network anchors and newspaper columnists themselves had become part of the elite, and they had to be made the target of an angry, outlier candidate.” Enter Trump. While not necessarily sanguine about the chances, Kalb looks closely at the clash of visions between Joseph McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower more than 60 years ago, with the hopeful thought that some like force might help temper Trump. However, he notes, McCarthy “was the most popular Republican in the country” after Ike himself. McCarthy connects to Roy Cohn, and Cohn to Trump, who learned his lessons well: Never admit error, and never apologize. While there’s a little too much appeal here to the ghost of Edward R. Murrow and perhaps not enough practical resistance, the author rightly points out how the media brought some of the trouble on themselves by allowing Trump all the oxygen in the room—which can be fixed.
In this brief yet vigorous broadside, Kalb concludes that the media must shoulder the burden of checking the authoritarian impulse at work today: “There is no other option.”Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8157-3530-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
