Read this excellent book; it’s your civic duty.
Daily Beast columnist Tomasky (Bill Clinton, 2017, etc.) confirms what we already knew—America is polarized—and masterfully charts how it always has been that way, especially at the beginning. What we are now experiencing is pure tribalism.
In decades past, political quarrels often ran within party lines as much as between opposites, and historical conditions and social and institutional forces caused them to compromise. That is no longer the case. The Democratic Party is a diverse group coalition of interest groups, while the Republican Party is more of a single movement, believing mostly in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and strong defense. The current administration has largely tossed much of what used to be known as “traditional values.” The author expertly sifts through American history, citing compromises, which mostly made everyone unhappy. However, there was an era of genuine bipartisanship, roughly 1945 to 1980, when we had a national consensus and people worked together; this is what Tomasky calls an aberration of civility. Even though it was not necessarily true, people believed in the “American Way of Life.” Many causal events contributed to our current political atmosphere: the religious right’s sudden activism (against desegregation, among other issues); the Ronald Reagan administration’s dedication to deregulation, especially of banks; Newt Gingrich’s toxic attack against basic standards and norms; and the savings and loan crisis. Regarding Gingrich, Tomasky writes, “forty years later, I think it’s clear that in terms of the influence he’s had on conservatism and on both the discourse and practice of politics, he has been, for better or worse, the most influential Republican of his age.” The worst of our polarization has likely flowed from the Bill Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election. Refreshingly, Tomasky also offers “A Fourteen-Point Agenda to Reduce Polarization,” which includes a host of reasonable ideas—e.g., end gerrymandering and the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, and, intriguingly, “reduce college to three years and make year four a service year.”
Read this excellent book; it’s your civic duty.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-408-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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