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 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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