Immense, painstakingly researched, painfully engrossing account of how the battle on America's home front ended its longest and least popular war. Wells (formerly Univ. of San Francisco, Mills College) makes clear at the outset where he stands on the historical issue of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement; he has ``made no effort to conceal'' his opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Moreover, he argues that the antiwar movement was no marginal phenomenon. Because American warmongers took it seriously (particularly Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson was driven from office), it had a pervasive effect on the war effort itself, among other things compelling President Nixon to ``phase out'' the draft and ``Vietnamize'' the war. In addition, Nixon's lack of understanding of the antiwar movement led him to try to suppress opposition so ruthlessly (often employing provocateurs and other dirty tricks) that he overreached and eventually toppled from office. Wells discusses the internecine conflicts among antiwar activists and the leftist polarization of many in the movement as the war dragged on and as many, formerly moderate opponents of the war came to the conclusion that revolution was necessary to end it. While the movement's diversity was its strength as it expanded from a radical fringe into a mainstream political force, internal strife among religious groups, Trotskyites, and others that shared little more than opposition to American war aims split the movement apart. Although the coalition splintered and seemed ultimately to founder, Wells concludes that the antiwar movement's long-term contributions to American democracy, as well as to ending the war itself, were substantial. A balanced, absorbing, tragic narrative of the massive groundswell of popular revulsion that eventually thwarted the directors of America's war in Southeast Asia. (47 b&w photographs- -not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08367-9
Page Count: 650
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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
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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