Political scientists, sociologists, economists have reviewed Tocqueville's descriptions and prophecies—but it was a journalistic brainstorm to take the notes Tocqueville made during the 1831 tour on which Democracy in America was based (published in 1938 as Tocqueville and Beaumont in America), and "recreate Tocqueville's journey": ask the same questions of the same sorts of people; see what American democracy had become. For Reeves, it also starts as a chance to sound off, with a nod to Tocqueville, on perennial themes of his own: big government (which Tocqueville warned against), low-caliber leadership (which he decried). And the book is as much Reeves as Tocqueville throughout. But in the passage from Newport to Montgomery to Detroit to Boston and New York, the big questions that Tocqueville raised—"tyranny of the majority," commercialism, social inequality, racial discrimnation—surface again and again. In Newport, Reeves finds 79 radio stations to choose among, plus six areanewspapers and 250 different magazines. "Did information, the truth, set men free—or were individual thought and action drowning in tidal waves of facts and ideas?" In Rochester, seat of Gannett newspapers, the question takes another turn—giving the public what it wants ("Neuharth is interested in growing, not in education"). But in Rochester, too, social critic Christopher Lasch ("Democracy. . .has failed") and Marxist historian Eugene Genovese ("It's still working") differ. So the pot bubbles. Cincinnati brings a review of judicial power. Potter Stewart, a native son: "The courts have replaced the frontier" as a liberating force; Darlene Kamine, a 27-year-old attorney: "Our system is based on equal access. . .the 'little' man can go one on one with the faceless corporation" (and so feels part of the system). In Detroit come the stiffest views—from talented, successful blacks: "the old rigidity is returning. The golden time is over for people like me. The white reaction to the riots was defensive. Next time it will be offensive." Yet Reeves ends positively: democracy is effective in translating "the will of the people. . .into public policies and systems protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No order, no rigor, no real resolution-but a lively sounding on issues that democracy itself keeps alive.
Pub Date: May 28, 1982
ISBN: 0671470671
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1982
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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