A rigorous, dense historical study that reveals how three individuals helped pave the way for the American century.
A meticulously researched examination of the dynamic among three important American newsmakers of the early 20th century.
Jane Addams was the vociferous pacifist, and Theodore Roosevelt was hellbent on military buildup. President Woodrow Wilson straddled the fence as long as he could. In this chronological work, Lanctot, the author of two books on early professional baseball, delineates the incremental influence each person had on the other two as Europe became enmeshed in a bloody conflict and the U.S. tried to stay neutral. Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, “where dedicated men and women lived among the urban poor while providing much needed social services,” was an important voice in progressive causes such as protection for workers and women’s suffrage. She advocated for diplomacy among the world leaders and actually traveled to meet them. Roosevelt, former president and leader of the progressive Bull Moose Party, believed the U.S. should take an active military lead. While his sons participated in a “War Department–run military training camp” in upstate New York, he pushed for universal military service as a boost to his political comeback in 1916. Wilson, obsessed after his wife’s death with widow Edith Galt, with whom he shared state secrets, had originally campaigned on neutrality. He held off the hawks even after German submarines torpedoed the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, while Roosevelt believed he was instrumental in getting Wilson to accept his view that “unless America prepares to defend itself she can perform no duty to others.” Germany’s continued aggressive submarine missions gradually helped turn American opinion until the spark of the Zimmerman Telegram, which revealed a German plot to enlist Mexico in an invasion of the U.S. Lanctot’s book is too long and his prose too wordy, but he delivers an interesting take on how Addams, Roosevelt, and Wilson interacted in alternately cooperative and competitive ways.
A rigorous, dense historical study that reveals how three individuals helped pave the way for the American century.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1059-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
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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