An astute discussion of a significant but often neglected component of British history.
A historical account of a diagram that helped to provide the intellectual foundation for Margaret Thatcher’s political revolution.
When Thatcher was elected the leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party in 1976, the country was mired in economic malaise and political disillusionment. That same year, Sir John Hoskyns, a successful businessman with no previous political experience, mapped out what he thought were the principal causes of the nation’s economic dysfunction—a graphic display that came to be known as the “wiring diagram.” The following year, he converted this into an electoral and political strategy titled the “Stepping Stones” report, which became the philosophical fulcrum of Thatcher’s successful election campaign in 1979 as well as a blueprint for her subsequent approach to governance. At the heart of the plan was an opposition to entrenched union power, protected by the Labour Party, which demanded low unemployment and high wages via government programs. This squeezed a government already pinched by declining productivity in the private sector, causing accumulating debt and higher taxes—strategies that, in Hoskyns’ view, only compounded the original problem. Clouse (Six Nine, Two Ten, 2016, etc.) begins by sketching out the historical context for Hoskyns’ contribution to Thatcher’s success, including an account of the domestic political scene as well as the theoretical fight between free-market economists and the dominant Keynesians of the time. Clouse’s exposition is impressively meticulous and lucid throughout this book, rendering Hoskyns’ complex vision accessible to patient readers. He takes them on a tour of the wiring diagram in its entirety, clearly explaining each of the cells that represent economic causes and effects of underperformance. Further, he carefully limns the differences between the wiring diagram and the political report it birthed as well as the real differences between Thatcher’s and Hoskyns’ views. Finally, he displays a firm grasp of the historical import of Hoskyns’ sketch: “It presented basic truths that were turned into policies, and those policies improved the lives of millions of ordinary people.”
An astute discussion of a significant but often neglected component of British history.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5410-6857-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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