Effective recap of a population bubble that steamrollered history and won’t quit.
Academic analysis of a phenomenal generation through the experiences of six baby boomers.
Gillon (History/Univ. of Oklahoma) hews to the consensual definition of boomers as those born between 1946, when WWII vets and their wives began making up for lost time, and 1965, when widespread use of the contraceptive pill put the final skids under a declining birth rate. This mass of some 78 million would radically change the nation, yet the “life experiences of a child born in 1946,” the author asserts, “were very different from one born in 1964.” Early boomers labored to reconcile Kennedy-inspired idealism with reality, Gillon points out; later boomers, raised in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, had less to reconcile. Though boomers are frequently derided as self-absorbed whiners consumed by self-fulfillment, the author believes such criticism sells short the generation that expanded personal freedom in the US by championing not only civil rights, but gay rights, women’s rights, handicapped rights, and the right to privacy. Yet the first generation to grow up with TV was divided almost as much as the rest of the country on Vietnam, although boomers were the only segment of the population to register a small majority against Nixon’s 1968 presidential victory. The first boomer chief exec survived impeachment to leave office with the highest approval rating of any postwar president. Boomer readers should find affinities with some, but perhaps not all, of the lives Gillon presents. While characterized as “typical,” the three women and three men profiled include the TV writer who made thirtysomething an icon, a paralyzed Vietnam vet whose activism has drawn national attention, the founder of an ad agency that made its mark exploiting boomers, and an African-American whose religious epiphany helped spur a conservative backlash.
Effective recap of a population bubble that steamrollered history and won’t quit.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2947-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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