A learned, provocative guide to modern authoritarianism masked as conservatism.
A sweeping history of the right wing in American politics.
The protestations of adherents notwithstanding, there’s not much of a live-and-let-live ethos in American conservatism, born of European ideas of “fixed hierarchies (notably of gender, race, and nationality) and cultural homogeneity.” Unfortunately for them, people of different races and nationalities soon came along to undermine that cultural homogeneity, pressing for their rights—and, Hahn observes, those who have fought most consistently and persistently have always been “those who have been denied them.” Consider one of the author’s examples: The bloody King Philip’s War of 1675 ended with the destruction and enslavement of the Abenaki people, resulting in a Puritan plantation economy that favored the wealthy. Of course, the rich tended to approve of those fixed hierarchies, while the landless battled the perceived collusion among speculators and the colonial government that hindered their ownership of property. Just so, illiberal regimes in both the North and the South before and after the Civil War built economies based on involuntary servitude, whether the forced labor of enslaved people or the forced labor of the incarcerated, whose population grew dramatically following emancipation. “Between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century,” writes Hahn, “Black prison populations from the Carolinas to Texas increased more than tenfold,” and with them the social Darwinist doctrines that presumed the inherent criminality of Black people. Modern manifestations of illiberal political repression continue this practice, while also battling on fronts familiar to all of us, from the movement to outlaw abortion to efforts to restrict voting rights. Hahn capably ferrets out antecedents, writing, sensibly, “there is no good way to understand how crime, race, and immigration became so effectively weaponized in recent years without recognizing the very deep roots that had been sunk more than a century before.”
A learned, provocative guide to modern authoritarianism masked as conservatism.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780393635928
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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