“New York has taught me to put capital and capitalists closer to the center of modern history,” Beckert writes. His account...
A fascinating history of New York during the late 19th-century, a time when big money was changing the face of the city.
The word “bourgeoisie” doesn’t get much of a workout these days, now that Marxist-tinged analyses of the world have become suspect even within academia. But Beckert (History/Harvard Univ.) employs the term fearlessly to describe New York’s mercantile class, whose members, in the early decades of the 19th century, tended to lead quiet, unostentatious private lives. That class, which included large numbers of traders and ship owners, owed much of its wealth to the international cotton trade, which bound New York to the South (and, in large measure, explains why the city gave only lukewarm support to the Union cause during much of the Civil War). In the postwar era, Beckert writes, the merchants’ power was eroded by a new kind of capitalist, the manufacturer. Many of these newly wealthy industrialists, who profited greatly from the war and worked their way up from the shop floor to ownership, were inclined to more public displays of wealth. Shunned as arrivistes, they nonetheless gained supremacy over the better-established merchants. What is more, they had a stronger grasp of politics, and through various mechanisms they remade city and, later, state government into an arm that served their interests with private legislation and other species of cronyism. The new plutocracy asserted itself with huge mansions, soirees that aped the manners of the European nobility (the author often returns to a fancy dress party at the end of the century, to which dozens of New York’s grandes dames came costumed as Marie Antoinette—whose fate, “they confidently believed, would not be theirs”), and other unsubtle displays of conspicuous consumption. Their arrival on the scene, Beckert insists, added a new dimension to the history of class struggle—and their influence on American politics endures in the age of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
“New York has taught me to put capital and capitalists closer to the center of modern history,” Beckert writes. His account is a dazzlingly successful exercise in doing just that.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-521-79039-5
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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