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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
