An insightful and informative look at a familiar piece of history.
Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books and a former Washington Post correspondent, offers a personality-focused analysis of the relationship between U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson.
This book dives into America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia, focusing specifically on how the personal qualities of McNamara and Johnson contributed to their mismanagement of the Vietnam War. Osnos opens with McNamara’s background and his role in the Kennedy administration, then looks at Johnson’s sudden ascension to the presidency in 1963. The book follows the two men’s decision-making processes over the following year, showing how they began to diverge—both personally and professionally—and then examining how the war’s progress affected their sense of self and historical legacies. He concludes that there was little chance that the United States could have extricated itself from the conflict and avoided the loss of tens of thousands of lives, due to the two men’s conceptions of the presidency, their relative strengths and weaknesses as political actors, and fraught relationship with each other. Although there’s no shortage of books on the Vietnam War, this one offers a distinct approach, which benefits from Osnos’ unique insights into one of the principals: For more than a decade, he served as McNamara’s book editor, including the secretary’s memoirs. Osnos recorded extensive editorial interviews with him, and this book draws heavily on their transcripts, delving deeply into McNamara’s thinking and highlighting areas in which he was more candid or introspective than he was in public statements. Without similar insider access to Johnson, Osnos still does a solid job of assessing the former president using existing research, particularly Robert A. Caro’s biographies. Along the way, the author strongly and clearly identifies the stakes and implications of his subjects’ choices: “Nothing in LBJ’s character, especially after the humiliation of the years as vice president, could possibly be more important to him than restoring his self-confidence as a politician and as a man with power and the capacity to use it.”
An insightful and informative look at a familiar piece of history.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781953943552
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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