Chomsky is doubtless the most eminent American linguist/philosopher. Though the media have called him a hero of the New Left, it is as an uncompromisingly anti-Vietnam war professor that he has been the ally of students for the past three years. As an anti-imperialist, he offers no fundamental historical explanations here. What his dissection of American power displays is a prodigious grasp of specific foreign-policy issues and events of the 30's and 40's, as well as a gift for detailed destruction of current myths. His approach, then, is analytic rather than synthetic. He is preoccupied with the perversion of objective rationality. His comments on the social role of intellectuals are relatively weak compared with his specific indictments of the "Orwellian logicians" who claim "we are defending national independence when we protect a ruling elite from internal insurgency," and whose air of detachment presupposes "the value of stability and nonviolence—by the oppressed" rather than the obligation to speak the truth which Chomsky thinks intellectuals used to recognize. To say that Chomsky is mourning the death of genuine liberalism would be too simple. But he comes down hard on the "liberal imperialists like Schlesinger who have betrayed a privileged access to the truth which the lower levels of "creeping Eichmannism" do not enjoy. . . . It is hard to convey the book's gravity, simplicity, unself-righteousness and sheer intelligence; it is safe to predict both popular consumption and permanent worth.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1968
ISBN: 156584775X
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1968
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 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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