Churchwell demonstrates a lively intellect, as she exhibited early in her publishing career with The Many Lives of Marilyn...
Investigating two ubiquitous yet murky expressions—“America First” and the “American Dream”—through “a genealogy of national debates” that surround them.
Churchwell (American Literature /Univ. of London; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, 2013, etc.) introduces these ill-defined concepts and then uses broad historical research to demonstrate their intersections during portions of the last three centuries. Although the detailed narrative ends in 1941, the author offers an epilogue covering the years 1945 to 2017, mostly focused on Donald Trump and his associates. Churchwell demonstrates that when the concepts of the American dream and “America First” arose in the culture and the language of the U.S., those terms tended to signify the opposites of their meanings today. At any given moment, each term has been linked, for better or worse, to the American concepts of democracy, capitalism, and racial equality—or inequality, as the case may be. Churchwell acknowledges her preferred definitions, but she mostly avoids moral judgments in favor of pointing out shifting historical trends. So when Trump (or others) talk about “America First” or the American dream, their crabbed definitions may have different connotations than in previous decades. For example, “America First” has, at times, suggested isolationism from the remainder of the world, especially leading up to the world wars. At other times, it has suggested unthinking patriotism or even implied racism due to the desire for a whiter population. As for the American dream, Churchwell shows persuasively that, initially, it signified opposing the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, since business moguls rarely cared about the well-being of society as a whole. In 2018, however, it seems many Americans aspire to unabashed self-enrichment.
Churchwell demonstrates a lively intellect, as she exhibited early in her publishing career with The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004). The only weakness of this book, which provides much food for thought, stems from generalizations about the way “most Americans” define the two key concepts. That knowledge is, of course, ultimately unknowable.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7340-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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