An accessible, cheerful, and affectionate portrait of Americans who, though little known, made a difference.
A survey of footnote-level historical figures who exemplify McMahon’s declaration, “the best Americans are not always famous.”
“America’s Government Teacher,” as McMahon brands herself, turns out to be a reliable guide into lesser-known corners of history as well. Her initial specimen is Gouverneur Morris, a friend of Alexander Hamilton and signer of the Declaration of Independence who is unjustly forgotten in our day, McMahon holds. Morris, after all, wrote the preamble to the Constitution (“We the people…”). Many more of McMahon’s subjects were never known to history in the first place: the enslaved Clara Brown, for instance, who moved westward to frontier Colorado and built a tidy fortune that, alas, did not outlive her. McMahon calls on the clothier Levi Strauss, who added rivets to jeans and then “marketed the heck out of them” as “the only kind made by white labor” (though enslaved people grew the cotton and indigo). The mid-19th-century president James Buchanan openly lived with a man who “helped found a city you may have heard of because of the Civil Rights movement: Selma, Alabama.” Katherine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” also had a same-sex partner; as a couple, they “were obviously in love and ‘together’ together.” McMahon tips her hat to Daniel Inouye, the Hawaiian senator who, in the era of Japanese American imprisonment during World War II, distinguished himself as a battlefield hero. The author is generally nonsectarian, though she gets in a subtle dig or two at Trump, denounces the “moral panic” that is the enemy of progress, and defends critical race theory. Her carefully researched book is just plain fun to read, especially at moments such as her takedown of those who hold that the Civil War was about states’ rights: “Calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the ‘right’ to do?”
An accessible, cheerful, and affectionate portrait of Americans who, though little known, made a difference.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593541678
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Thesis/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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