Sure to elicit controversy, this is a worthwhile addition to a volatile, necessary discussion.
Startling insider’s account of how the firearms industry struck a Faustian bargain with extremism for profit.
With some anguish but also precision and wit, Busse fuses business history with memoir in this unsparing examination of American gun culture’s devolution. “I am responsible for selling millions of guns…[yet] I detested everything about the Trump-driven boom, which meant that my entire livelihood was a contradiction,” he writes. The author is aware of how the role of firearms in society has mutated, starting with its importance to rural life, central to his childhood on a Kansas ranch. The scrappy camaraderie of the industry seemed appealing when he joined Kimber, a struggling company focused on high-end pistols, but his enthusiasm waned as the industry embraced the AR-15 rifle and post–9/11 conspiracy theories (alongside rising sales). Busse emphasizes how legal and social codes regarding gun ownership have eroded in the era of mass shootings and open carry aggressiveness. This process accelerated in the 1990s in response to the Brady Bill, assault weapons ban, and market fluctuations, which showed gun executives that weapons sales could be amplified in response to politics. Busse positions the National Rifle Association as central to this, developing their now-familiar political strategy of ideological purity, while “no industry professional wanted to believe that the main driver of our business was anything but genius.” He terms the gradual result “a powerful political machine radicalizing our nation.” For years, the author was a lonely voice in a tightknit industry: “I thought I could keep the industry from changing, and then I spent years fighting to hold a battle line within it.” Busse portrays his years in the industry lucidly, and his anger regarding its wrong turns and destructive influence seems genuine. “Our country had arrived at the point where military guns were the symbols of an entire political movement,” he writes.
Sure to elicit controversy, this is a worthwhile addition to a volatile, necessary discussion.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6873-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
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