A passionate plea to return justice to the mission of the Department of Justice.
How and why the U.S. Department of Justice lost its way.
Created by Congress in 1870, the Department of Justice, has, on occasion, been a force for the good, writes Maddow, MS NOW host and author (Drift, 2012, etc.). More often, she adds, it has been abused to protect the interests of corporations, corrupt politicians, and self-serving presidents. In her fiery retelling of the DOJ’s checkered history, there are few untainted heroes. In the 1860s, Amos T. Akerman, President Grant’s attorney general, courageously prosecuted murdering Klansmen in York County, South Carolina. A century later, John Doar, the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was fighting a newly emboldened KKK in Alabama. Actively undermined by FBI Director Edgar J. Hoover, he nonetheless secured convictions of the killers of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. But in Maddow’s gallery of attorneys general, the scoundrels and “narrow-minded and partisan hacks” predominate: Richard Olney, who cozied up to railroad magnates and jailed labor organizer Eugene V. Debs; Harry Daugherty, who under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge used the office to line his own pockets; Ed Meese, “Ronald Reagan’s loyal and faithful parrot”; and, most consequentially, William Barr, who, under President Trump, “levered the power and the prestige of the Department of Justice to save the president’s bacon.” The author’s style is delightfully caustic, even Twainian, as when she characterizes the DOJ under Daugherty as a “a ten-story bribe department store” and designates a DOJ recommendation that Trump be publicly cleared of election interference a “Cover Your Ass memo.” Written with a novelist’s skill for revelatory detail and a historian’s sharp eye for continuities, the book both infuriates and inspires. The moral indignation seething through Maddow’s account culminates in her conclusion, in which she calls on Congress to beef up the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General and reminds us of the department’s long-forgotten purpose: “to fight for everyone in America to have the protections of the U.S. Constitution, including against their own government.”
A passionate plea to return justice to the mission of the Department of Justice.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780593444542
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2026
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
