A one-of-a-kind—though not particularly revealing—perspective on the Clinton presidency.
A history of the Bill Clinton years based on taped interviews with the president while he was in office.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Branch (At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968, 2006, etc.) approaches the story of Clinton’s administration from a unique angle. As a longtime friend of the family, in 1993 the author agreed to assist in recording what was, in effect, Clinton’s secret diary. In 79 informal sessions, held sporadically until 2001, Clinton talked spontaneously about recent events, aiming to create an unfiltered, on-the-spot record of events for future historians. The interviews cover a lot of ground: the president’s failed health-care reform, the conflict in Bosnia, the Whitewater controversy, the 1996 reelection campaign and much more. Because Branch is very much Clinton’s friend, however, he doesn’t get below the president’s well-polished surface when it comes to uncomfortable topics. For example, the president was standoffish on the subject of Monica Lewinsky, and Branch was simply too polite to press him on it. The few unguarded episodes—including the time Clinton dozed off in the middle of a taping session due to his exhaustion in the wake of the Democrats’ crushing defeat in the 1994 Congressional elections, or when he recalled his final visit with his beloved mother, shortly before her death—are the most riveting aspects of the book. But there aren’t many surprises here—Clinton, after all, used the tapes as reference material for his 2004 memoir—and Branch’s interest in minutiae, such as descriptions of delays he faced when he went to visit the president, slow the narrative. Presidential history buffs will certainly appreciate the you-are-there, nuts-and-bolts account of the Clinton administration, but Branch fails to capture an honest portrait of a man who may be, ultimately, unknowable.
A one-of-a-kind—though not particularly revealing—perspective on the Clinton presidency.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4333-6
Page Count: 668
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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