The gritty details of a chapter of American history that still resonates strongly.
An analysis of the forces that led to Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate of 1964.
The era of Perlstein’s Goldwater is not so far from ours. The second most charismatic politician alive in the early 1960s (after John Kennedy), Goldwater was a man before his time. He was a relative outsider who knocked heads with the greats of the past (Kennedy, Johnson, Rockefeller, and Nixon), but more important were his associations with the heroes (Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist) of more recent conservative triumphs. Goldwater’s crusade was against moderation, and his jeremiads convinced millions to support him. He argued that civil-rights legislation would create a police state; he felt the US should be prepared for an all-out nuclear war; he saw unions as oppressors of the working class. His rhetoric gained an audience, Perlstein argues, because of the many fractures present in the Republican Party at the time. While the Rockefeller Republicans haggled with Nixon (Perlstein describes Rocky as a “collector of chits”), Goldwater waited. He enjoyed the backing of a cadre of marginal party officials, led by expert political operatives like Clif White, who were preparing to seize the nomination. Perlstein documents every backroom meeting, every press conference, every turn of events that led to the Goldwater troops realizing that goal. The troops are what’s important here: Goldwater the man is just one aspect of Goldwater the movement. The attention to detail and the cast of characters is at times tiresome, but will be a marvelous resource for political scientists. Perlstein, who writes for the Nation clearly delights at relating Johnson's landslide defeat of the Arizona senator, yet he conveys the mindset of a Goldwater supporter with respect, asking readers to put themselves in the shoes of small businessmen bogged down by unions and the New York financial establishment.
The gritty details of a chapter of American history that still resonates strongly.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-2859-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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