So crammed that it belies navigation and so committed to its cause that it erodes believability: a text that provides ample...
Terrific material on Hollywood resisters, marred by imprecision and excess.
Buhle (American Civilization/Brown Univ.) and journalist Wagner attempt to “capture the rich texture of the lives of those . . . Hollywoodites named in congressional hearings during the late 1940s and early 1950s as ‘subversive.’ ” Co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist (1997), Buhle knows his subject and reveals it in his extensive background on leftist golden-era screenwriters and players like Michael Wilson and John Howard Lawson, who were affected by blacklisting. Also interesting is the ongoing analysis of how film genres like fantasy, noir, and westerns were reshaped by their left-leaning writers and actors. But these two strong elements, though the focus of the narrative, are regularly obscured by profuse side information and commentary that generates contentiousness rather than illumination. For example, most people are identified in terms of their relation to the cause: “left-leaning screenwriter (later semi-friendly witness) Melvin Levy”; “French Catholic radical critic Andre Bazin”; etc. Perceived opponents are dismissed; Catholicism is negatively conservative; and the Judeo-Christian tradition offers only “reaffirmation of the social order.” Anachronistic modern-day lingo applied to historical figures (for example, the description of Depression-era screenwriter John Bright's wife, Josefina Fierro, as “the leading Chicana of the Left”) compromises overall believability. Also aggravating are the authors’ many questionable assertions presented as fact: that no later film of Katharine Hepburn's approached the accomplishments of left-wing-written Holiday and The Philadelphia Story (how about The African Queen?); that Hollywood drove Clifford Odets's self-opinion so low that “giving names was only one more self-abasement” (an excuse?); that Warner Bros. required a “happy ending” for its films (what about White Heat?). Such comments don't diminish the authors’ good intentions, just their trustworthiness.
So crammed that it belies navigation and so committed to its cause that it erodes believability: a text that provides ample background but limited enjoyment. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-718-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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