An account of American greatness undermined by its relentless cheerleading.
An unabashedly patriotic look at 40 Americans who exemplify the nation’s principal virtues.
Like many others, Ruesterholz believes the United States occupies a privileged place in the history of nations, a beacon of liberty and innovation for others. “America has inspired more freedom in more places than ever before; that is a reason to be proud,” he writes. “By encouraging hard work and rewarding success, America is home to unprecedented wealth. Today, Americans are worth over $130 trillion, an unrivaled sum. We have a history of innovation and invention from airplanes to rocket ships and smart phones to search engines.” To show the greatness of the United States, he profiles 40 admirable citizens from diverse realms. In this collection, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn join activists like Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and captains of commerce like Steve Jobs and Andrew Carnegie turn up along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Ruesterholz’s choices are not always the obvious ones: Along with more famous names, he discusses the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, who rose up against their attackers, showing how the “darkest of evils brought out the moral courage of seemingly ordinary citizens.” Each of the eight sections in his book focuses on a defining trait of the country: “resilience, daring, faith, fairness, sacrifice, drive, industriousness, and innovativeness.” The profiles are brief—typically only a couple of pages apiece—which tends to result in less-than-searching accounts that stick to well-known information.
Ruesterholz writes in a breezy style that evinces an optimistic and infectious good cheer: “Simply put, it is better to do and fail than to live life on the sidelines, cynically criticizing the doers.” And if the individual profiles amount to biographical snapshots, collectively they reveal the dizzying diversity of America’s luminaries; for all the author’s unconcealed partisanship for America as a whole, his apolitical cast of characters transcends ideology. A kind of kaleidoscopic history of the nation emerges through the profiles, bringing into sharp relief the challenges it has faced, including war, internal strife, and economic deprivation. At times the author’s optimism overwhelms the possibility of a more balanced, nuanced account, both of the individual subjects as well as America in general. Steve Jobs was a marvelous innovator, but he was also a man of questionable integrity, a fact his profile omits. Ruesterholz nods to America’s flaws: “No nation is perfect, but what defines America is our constant striving to be more perfect, to live up to our ideals, and to be a land with more opportunity for more people than anywhere else on Earth. In their own way, each of these forty individuals helped to advance America and enrich our culture. Anyone who can learn from and model the great attributes of these men and women will lead a successful life.” He tends, however, to gloss over his subjects’ imperfections. He rightly notes that countless Black Americans have risked their lives “to protest segregation and unjust laws and to fight for racial equality” without noting that their country established those unjust laws in the first place. The author has a right to celebrate the accomplishments and virtues of the nation—but excluding its accompanying vices paints a tableau more sanguine than true.
An account of American greatness undermined by its relentless cheerleading.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-471-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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