Occasionally facile but credible examination of the GOP’s self-destructive Congress-centric power shift.
Political writer Schaller (Political Science/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, 2006) examines how Republicans sacrifice presidential power for congressional clout.
The author tackles a subject that has been bandied about in radio and TV in superficial ways but until now has not really been comprehensively covered in extended book-length form: how the Republican Party has not only become a political party at war with itself, but also a party that has become, in a purely congressional context, one of the most disruptive and obstructive forces in American political history and a party whose presidential potential has steadily diminished. Schaller’s main thesis is clear: “The Republican Party is a Congress-centered and specifically a House-heavy party because congressional Republicans made choices and staked out positions during the post-Reagan era that tended to benefit themselves at the expense of the party’s presidential candidates.” While this is a somewhat general history of the post-Reagan Republican Party, it’s also a straightforward recent history of the party’s steady shift rightward, culminating in the far-right tea party wing. Schaller puts forward Newt Gingrich, not Reagan, as the most significant figure in the Republican Party. Gingrich, after all, instituted the policy that avoids compromise with the opposition at all costs, which is the same policy in effect today. Unfortunately, the author spreads his research too thin at times, and the main thrust of his argument tends to get lost in peripheral historical detail. The writing is also pockmarked with the sort of pesky political clichés and catchphrases that can often mar mainstream political radio and TV. However, Schaller takes care not to let the book fall into overly partisan territory (although he's assuredly pro-Democrat), and he lays out a simple, just-the-facts approach. He ends with a conclusion that’s as simplistic as it is convincing.
Occasionally facile but credible examination of the GOP’s self-destructive Congress-centric power shift.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-17203-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
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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