An entertaining, highly tendentious account of where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
A Canadian author examines America’s historical sins.
According to Wright (A Short History of Progress, 2005, etc.), America’s contempt for government regulation, conservation and international cooperation, her gun-crazy, religious zealotry and her abandonment of the public good in favor of military and market imperatives, all promise to make the New World Order depressingly like the Old. Especially now, he argues, after the depletion of the “loot, labour and land” that fueled the Columbian Age, we must squarely face the facts, not the myths, of our record to avoid future chaos and catastrophe. Through a lens seemingly constructed by Howard Zinn and Jared Diamond, Wright’s oblique take on the past 500 years, a parade of European and American horrors, will not come as news to anyone who’s sat in a high school or college history classroom in the past 40 years. Still, few of those students will have likely heard so charming an analysis of American depredations. Drawing especially on his deep knowledge of the Indian cultures populating the hemisphere before European contact and employing a particularly wide-ranging set of literary references from Melville to Jonathan Franzen, Emerson to Primo Levi, Wright approvingly cites Tocqueville, Frederick Jackson Turner, Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, John Maynard Keynes, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. Among the many villains identified, Andrew Jackson takes pride of place, closely followed by Nixon, both Bushes, Theodore Roosevelt, Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. The author speaks kindly of the League of Nations, the Kyoto Accord and the European Union, but disparagingly about globalization (“a feeding frenzy”) and deregulation (“a free-for-all to grab the most in the shortest time”). Though he warns against the errors of “presentism” (projecting current values onto history) and hyperbole, Wright can’t seem to help himself, prematurely placing Barack Obama in a list of prophets that include Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King.
An entertaining, highly tendentious account of where we’ve been and where we’re headed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-78672-097-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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