A strange corner of the Cold War explored, to fascinating result.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this metaphor!
In this leisurely, searching footnote to history, Wright (Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent Univ.; Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine, 2002, etc.) examines one of its little fibs and fudges: the authorship of the pregnant phrase “iron curtain.” Winston Churchill arrived in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946, to give an address at Westminster College with Harry Truman, and there uttered the famous phrase, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” That much is well-known; less documented is the outraged response to Churchill’s formulation in the same address that Britain and the United States had a special relationship likely to become more special once the two nations stood up to Josef Stalin and his empire-building ambitions. Churchill weathered a storm of criticism from left and right (and the French, who resented being left out), but in time that storm quieted. Five years later, a package arrived at Churchill’s door containing a copy of the American College Dictionary and a note from its editor asking whether the “iron curtain” phrase was Churchill’s own. The bulldog replied in the affirmative, and therein lies the nub and the rub: For, as Wright ably chronicles, Churchill acknowledged the existence of the very real iron curtain, a fire-suppressing fixture of Victorian theaters, while saying that he hadn’t heard of the phrase used before him in its metaphorical sense. Thus it is that many dictionaries today attribute authorship to Churchill. Wright chases the phrase down, finding it in use in the early 20th century among British wonks before the outbreak of World War I. It then shifted eastward to refer to the divisions between the Bolsheviks and the rest of Europe in the 1930s. Wright’s investigation concludes with late developments in the phrase and its ideological uses and abuses in the era of McCarthy, atom spies and spooks.
A strange corner of the Cold War explored, to fascinating result.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-19-923150-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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