A progressive perspective on why the Clinton administration delivered so little.
How the moderation of the Clinton era sowed a legacy of problems.
Academics Lichtenstein, author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, and Stein, author of Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, approach their subject from the left side of the political spectrum. In this collaboration, they revisit the years of the Clinton administration, wondering why it moved so far from the quasi-socialist views of its early days to embrace a globalist neoliberalism that helped Wall Street more than Main Street. In the opening section of an overlong text, the authors offer an adequate review of the ideological development of Clinton and many figures within his administration, but this story has been told many times, including by Clinton himself. Lichtenstein and Stein are reluctant to criticize the Clinton years, so instead they focus on identifying a wide range of villains. They are initially unsure whether the Republicans who opposed Clinton’s early agenda were stupid or evil; eventually, they opt for both. They blame centrist Democrats. They blame the voters who handed control of Congress to the GOP in 1994. They blame various billionaires. The media. Larry Summers. Al Gore. It’s a long list. The authors believe that if Clinton had stayed on the left, and even marched further out to the edge, he would have won huge electoral support. However, that scenario didn’t seem likely then, and it does not seem likely in hindsight. The bigger question, however, is, why are the authors rehashing these events? If Lichtenstein and Stein are calling for a return to the days when big labor told the Democratic Party what to do, it does not sound like much of a way forward. The book may appeal to those on the left who are fascinated by their own myths, but other readers may take a pass.
A progressive perspective on why the Clinton administration delivered so little.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780691245508
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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