Of a piece with Paul Johnson’s Modern Times and other conservative-tending intellectual histories.
Mix monotheisms and mammon, and you have an unholy mess—and the present age.
So the reader might conclude after touring British historian Burleigh’s continuation of the project begun in Earthly Powers (2006): to “write a coherent history of modern Europe primarily organized around issues of mind and spirit rather than the merely material.” World War I brought psychic trauma that saw Europe and America reviving the deity while at the same time religion was losing its force; afterward, in an era of revolution and totalitarianism, many churches became partnered with the authoritarian state, driving liberals and libertarians further away. The less tolerant states made secular religions of themselves; thus Burleigh entertains the notion that a future archaeologist might one day conclude that early-20th-century Europe “witnessed a regression to the age of megaliths and funerary barrows before it succumbed to a more general primitive fury.” Atheists became members of the sanctified Bolshevik church, Lutheran pastors became priests of Nazism, Catholic leaders became complicit in crimes against humanity, even as the totalitarian regimes set about on a thorough program of “de-Christianization and massacres”; the first half of the century was a strange time indeed. The second half saw further strange bedfellowing, as with the rise of the European Christian Democratic parties, “whose sole raison d’être was to occupy and hang on to power at any price.” Burleigh casts a cold eye on all these regrettable goings-on, heating up when he arrives at the 1960s, whereon he fulminates about the general going to hell of Western civilization as “chippy girls like Cilla Black, Lulu, and Twiggy set forth on their forty years of stardom.” The turn in mood seems fitting, though, for Burleigh closes with an unhappy consideration of the current clash of civilizations and what he suggests is an official European habit of conceding whenever tasked by aggrieved religious minorities.
Of a piece with Paul Johnson’s Modern Times and other conservative-tending intellectual histories.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-058095-X
Page Count: 576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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 Yorkerstaff 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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