A capable history that explains much about modern American demographics.
A history of the cooperative effort that helped make the U.S. a second Jewish homeland.
Between 1881 and 1914, writes Ujifusa, author of Barons of the Sea, more than 10 million people entered the U.S. from Europe, “most of them…from the Russian Empire.” Because pogrom-ridden Russia imposed obstacles that made it difficult for Jews to travel, their flight was often illegal, and most arrived in Western Europe with few resources. Against this situation came three important figures. The first was Albert Ballin, the German Jewish director of the Hamburg-America Line, “the largest shipping company in the world,” who provided temporary settlement and, in time, subsidized travel through steerage. Monetary support came from New York financier Jacob Schiff. Less willing than those two was J.P. Morgan, who, having made a fortune in railroads, sought to extend his empire seaward and attempted to outflank and then absorb Ballin’s own maritime empire. The deal-making that resulted saw steerage passage for the refugees extended to other ocean liners; Ujifusa chronicles how soon-to-become-prominent figures such as Felix Frankfurter, Emma Goldman, Irving Berlin, and Mark Rothko arrived at Ellis Island. As the author also notes in this densely detailed account, Schiff was no softie: Having decided that his father-in-law was an ineffective head of the family banking business, he “began a steady and calculated effort to take over the firm,” and he wasn’t shy of throwing his well-funded weight around to get things done. Thanks to the efforts of the three magnates, the U.S. emerged as the most desirable destination for Jewish refugees, vastly enriching the nation economically and culturally with their talents—though, as the author acknowledges, not without opposition from government officials and nativists that dogged the effort until the collapse of the immigrant transport at the beginning of World War I.
A capable history that explains much about modern American demographics.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780062971876
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
HISTORY | JEWISH | UNITED STATES | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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