A tedious trek through a footnote to history, with very little bearing on contemporary homeland security concerns.
Two New Deal giants clash over the purpose of civil defense at the outset of World War II.
In May 1941, mindful of the German bombing of London, Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Civilian Defense to organize the protection of lives and property in the event of enemy attack. He appointed Fiorello La Guardia, the fiery mayor of New York City, as its first director. Obsessed with the danger of Axis bombing of American cities, La Guardia saw his agency as a means of militarizing the civilian population; he toured the country giving frightening speeches, recruiting air raid wardens, and organizing drills. Eleanor Roosevelt, appointed Assistant Director for Volunteer Participation, saw the agency instead as a means of promoting “social defense,” a wide variety of social services intended to improve the national morale and well-being. The president left these two powerful personalities to sort out their differences, with predictably awful results. Weary of their public bickering, Roosevelt forced them both out early in 1942; La Guardia's successor, James Landis, carried on La Guardia's programs and scrapped the first lady's. The conflict is readily depicted, but Dallek (Political Management/George Washington Univ.; The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics, 2000, etc.) fleshes it out with repetitious explanations, duplicative examples of letters received and speeches given, and numbing statistics of volunteers enlisted and gas masks distributed; the narrative has the feel of a scholarly journal article expanded to book length. The author fails to confront the contradictions between the bottom-up grass-roots volunteerism stimulated by war fever and the desires of the New Dealers for top-down command and control. Ultimately, no American cities were bombed, and the entire program appears significant only for its snapshots of national security hysteria and Eleanor’s attempts to promote progressive social goals under the cover of civil defense.
A tedious trek through a footnote to history, with very little bearing on contemporary homeland security concerns.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-974312-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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