The railroads may not have advanced civilization in America, notes this sharp-edged history, but they were eminently creative in their destruction.
Latter-day corporatistas will not be pleased with the neo-Marxist slant that eminent historian White (American History/Stanford Univ.; Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past, 1998, etc.) brings to his vigorous account of the 19th-century transcontinental railroads. It is that great scholar of entrepreneurship Joseph Schumpeter whose spirit guides much of White’s book, particularly his notion that capitalism involves “creative destruction,” the constant uprooting of the old for the new in order to sell it all over again. (Think of CDs replacing LPs, and of MP3s replacing CDs.) In the case of the railroads, the creative destruction involved the replacement of one form of corporation with another—and if, as White argues, the 19th-century railroad corporations almost always went bust in the manner of the dotcoms in our own time, the individuals who controlled those corporations mostly did well for themselves. As he writes, “[t]he celebrated creative destruction of capitalism is, it seems, gentle with the rich,” an observation not to be lost in our own time. White peoples the narrative with characters who are fascinating as case studies of the seven deadly sins, such as entrepreneur and wheeler-dealer Tom Scott, who “was not so much tainted by corruption as impregnated with it”; and Samuel Huntington, who railed against Scott for beating him at his own game, complaining that “the devil, the communist, and the Pa. R.R. have united against us.” Huntington opposed Leland Stanford, too, but Stanford was a staunch Republican, and the Republican powers that be warned him that if Huntington’s opposition cost Stanford his Senate seat, “they would punish Huntington by punishing [his] railroad.” And so forth, one alliance conspiring against another—but, as White makes clear, all conspiring to grow rich, and all at the expense of the working people. Excellent big-picture, popularly written history of the Howard Zinn mold, backed by a mountain of research and statistics.
Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06126-0
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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