An examination of economic evolution whose tone is more activist than academic.
Dees offers a concise history of England that focuses on its evolving economic reality.
As the author points out, England has been claimed as historical model of capitalism by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, though each, of course, drew sharply different conclusions. Dees attempts to chronicle England’s vast economic history with astonishing brevity—his study is well under 100 pages—to challenge the extent to which England’s progress from a band of warring tribes to a capitalist powerhouse was fueled by a turn toward the protection of property rights. In Dees’ interpretation, England’s economic progress is deeply complicated and was partially launched by King Henry VIII’s “obliteration of the Catholic Church,” a principal obstacle to moving beyond a feudal system. In fact, he asserts, it was the abolition of feudalism and serfdom in the 16th century, and not the industrial revolution of the 19th century, which spawned major increases in population and productivity. Still, he avers, it wasn’t property rights but “genocide and chattel and wage slavery” that powered its progress. Readers will find this to be a perspective that deserves a rigorous hearing. However, the author’s argument is far too quickly and cursorily developed to be convincing, and it’s undermined by a strident style: “Today’s professorial high priests of the sanctity of ‘private property rights’ always leave out the fact that the Roman slaveholders, the feudal lords, and the capitalists have always been the biggest violators of the property rights of others….” Dees’ work features many compelling suggestions; for example, he contends that the property rights of the smallholder produce far more economic progress than those of capitalists. However, this notion is insufficiently investigated. For the most part, this succinct work reads more like a political pamphlet than a scholarly study and is more about offering a moral message than engaging in deep economic and historical analysis.
An examination of economic evolution whose tone is more activist than academic.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781737481072
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Commons Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
HISTORY | ANCIENT | MODERN | GENERAL HISTORY
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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