A text both evocative and provocative for readers who like to think.
As our geography has long insulated us from foreign invasion, so has it shaped our temperament and enabled us to become a world power, a category we must modify but continue to inhabit.
In his latest book, Atlantic contributing editor Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, 2016, etc.), a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, employs several approaches. Memoir, literary history, military history, geopolitical analysis—all weave throughout this knowledgeable (and for Kaplan, brief) work. Literary allusions to Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and others appear continually, as do extensive meditations on key works about America, which Kaplan calls his “sacred” texts. Principal among these are several by Bernard DeVoto, Walter Prescott Webb, and Wallace Stegner. Kaplan pauses to discuss these texts—which he believes are enduringly relevant—during a long coast-to-coast (east-to-west) car trip he took in the spring of 2015. His was a jagged journey, up and down as well as side to side, and the author visited the usual (Mount Rushmore) and the barely known (small crumbling towns). He notes the vast waterways in the East and Midwest, waterways that allowed settlement and commerce to flourish, and he comments on the aridity of the West and the challenges it continues to present. Not everything he notes is newsworthy—e.g., there is lots of obesity in rural America and sameness in suburban shopping centers; small Western towns are dying—but in his final sections, Kaplan discusses in scholarly but accessible detail the significant role that America has played and must play in this shuddering world. He believes that we are the only ones who really can do so. He also notes with sorrow our treatment of Native Americans, our dire history of slavery, and other colossal failures of heart and humanity.
A text both evocative and provocative for readers who like to think.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58821-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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