A master scholar delivers a delightfully stimulating historical polemic.
A stern, thoroughly satisfying harangue on the realities of politics in the United States by the veteran, prizewinning historian.
Wilentz (American History/Princeton Univ.; Bob Dylan in America, 2010, etc.) emphasizes that two key factors of politics, ignored by lesser historians, are essential. The first—sure to jolt even educated readers—is that partisanship and party politics are essential to effective government. The Founding Fathers deplored it, and today’s presidential candidates assure us that they detest career politicians. Reformers denounce them, and Americans “want government conducted in a lofty manner, without adversarial confrontation and chaos. But more than two hundred years of antipartisanship has produced nothing,” writes the author. “This is because, despite their intentions, the framers built a political system which inspired partisan politics.” The second factor—less controversial but no less surprising—is that Americans hate economic privilege. Everyone agrees that vast material inequality threatens democracy. The author argues that the fight for racial and sexual equality during the 1960s and ’70s made that period an anomaly, and the conservative swing begun by President Ronald Reagan obscured it, but it returned with a vengeance after the economic crash of 2008. Conservatives today place less emphasis on moral arguments for a free market in favor of claiming that cutting taxes and government will provide jobs and eliminate poverty. Never shy about scolding colleagues, Wilentz maintains that the vogue of denigrating Thomas Jefferson has gone overboard, but he joins in the revival of the reputations of Thomas Paine and Lyndon Johnson. The author deplores the current fashion for giving idealistic outsiders credit for forcing crass politicians to do the right thing. Abolitionists did not compel Abraham Lincoln to promote emancipation, and Johnson supported civil rights long before he took office.
A master scholar delivers a delightfully stimulating historical polemic.Pub Date: May 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-28502-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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