A stark sermon to the choir that urges each member to sing—loudly and ceaselessly.
In our current political and cultural landscape, truth and fact have become the ignored and unloved siblings of belief and bias.
Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Kakutani (The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights and Other Artists at Work, 1988), who until recently was the chief book reviewer for the New York Times—already two black marks against her in the populist playbook: She reads, and she worked for the Times—offers a dark analysis of the rise of Donald Trump and the fall of any concern for facts. Firmly assertive and seriously argued (there is little humor here, but given the subject, few will blame the author), her text is also full of allusions to and quotations from writers and others, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Richard Hofstadter, William Butler Yeats, David Foster Wallace, and Ayn Rand. One short paragraph includes references to The Great Gatsby, Fight Club, Michel Houellbecq’s “willfully repellent novels,” No Country for Old Men, and the HBO series True Detective. Through it all, Kakutani’s strong presence sometimes disappears in a tangled wood of allusion and quotation. Still, she sees—and ably describes—with a depressing clarity the dangers of our brave new world. The author charts the decline of reason, the culture wars, the appeals of Trump and his “dog-whistle racism” (she is relentless in her attacks on the president), the language of dictators, the skills of Russian internet trolls, the dangers of the digital age, the blather about “fake news,” and, ultimately, the dire threat all of this poses for the democracy we profess to cherish. Kakutani also reminds us—as if we need reminding—that the German Nazi and Soviet Communist governments were hideous. Her final note: “without truth, democracy is hobbled.”
A stark sermon to the choir that urges each member to sing—loudly and ceaselessly.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57482-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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