A highly entertaining, if ultimately depressing, saga of greed and good-ol’-boy immorality. (b&w photos)
A journalist picks through an unsavory gumbo of political corruption in the Pelican State.
From 1992 to 1996, Times-Picayune reporter Bridges (The Rise of David Duke, 1994) was assigned to cover the story of legalized gambling in Louisiana—and a sordid story it was, too. There are actually two tales here: the attempt by Louisiana to balance its budget with taxes on gambling, and the Feds’ pursuit of Governor Edwin Edwards (whose investigation, arrest, and trial consume the final fourth of the story). Louisiana was in big trouble in the 1990s: The oil market had collapsed, and the state budget was bust. Edwards—who served four terms as governor and is now in federal prison—was a flamboyant, horny, seductive, and slick politician who loved to gamble. What more natural union than a high-rolling governor with legalized gambling? The Louisiana citizens and legislature barely approved the gambling issues (Bridges describes with devastating clarity the voting-machine hanky-panky in the legislature), but then the real fun began as Edwards’s friends and associates and wannabes of every stripe and stink scrambled to acquire the few riverboat licenses (and lone land-casino license) the state would grant. Swooping into Louisiana came planeloads of guys with big bucks and bad taste. The vast amounts of money involved (hundreds of millions—even billions of dollars) tainted just about everyone who came near the licensing process, including Edwards and his son (both of whom were among those convicted on federal charges). Bridges writes with command and ease about this byzantine and squalid enterprise and only occasionally reveals his disdain for the principals. Oddly, he seems annoyed that Edwards’s glamorous wife, Candy, is much younger than her husband (he repeatedly mentions the age disparity).
A highly entertaining, if ultimately depressing, saga of greed and good-ol’-boy immorality. (b&w photos)Pub Date: May 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-10830-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 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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