Next book

FIRST LADIES

PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIANS ON THE LIVES OF 45 ICONIC AMERICAN WOMEN

Though presented in a stilted fashion, all the portraits are rendered with sympathy and detail.

Selections from the popular yearlong C-SPAN series exploring the lives of the first ladies, each offering conversational, somewhat truncated viewpoints by various historians.

C-SPAN history consultant and author Richard Norton Smith and moderator and senior manager Swain paired up to create the TV endeavor; this book is the severely edited version. Each first lady appears in an official picture circa her husband’s presidential era, and two historians take turns delineating her biography, not necessarily chronologically. A final word from each briefly discusses the lady’s “legacy.” Due to the need to preserve verbatim the historians’ remarks, the editing makes for clunky, disjointed reading, with the effect—more or less intentional—of a conversation rather than a history text. However, each historian offers a depth to his or her subject that helps flesh out these fairly mythical figures who inhabited the White House and give a sense of where she came from and what was truly important to her. These ladies were thrust into a national role, and how they used it to grow is fascinating: Abigail Adams was a prolific and significant writer of letters that provide enormous insight into the Revolution and early national period; savvy entertainer Dolley Madison had to “pinch-hit” as hostess in widower Thomas Jefferson’s administration, laying the important connections she would need for her husband’s subsequent presidency; Sarah Polk was unusually well-educated in her mid-1800s era and served as her husband’s “genuine political partner” (the couple was also the first to be photographed); Lucretia Garfield was the first to keep a diary of her White House days and not to destroy her papers. Several were second wives, most had children, and many lost children, while all were “helpmates” in some fashion. Among the contributing historians are Edith Gelles, Gail Sheehy and David Maraniss.

Though presented in a stilted fashion, all the portraits are rendered with sympathy and detail.

Pub Date: April 14, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-61039-566-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 89


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 89


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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 Yorkerstaff 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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview