A lurid overview of some of the darkest dimensions of American history through the lens of the horror genre.
How terrifying narratives reflect the grisly realities of the American past and present.
In this follow-up to Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, history professor Poole surveys imaginative connections between the horror genre and the most brutal aspects of modern American history. The author argues that the appeal of these narratives can tell us a great deal about how the nation has struggled to make sense of its implication in imperial violence. “So much of the truth of the last one hundred years survives not in museum exhibitions or patriotic celebrations or lengthy documentary treatments but in horror films,” he writes. Focusing on a broad selection of representative films, TV shows, and fiction, Poole links particular works with events such as the Vietnam and Iraq wars, drawing out the allegorical significance of monstrous antagonists and their gory misadventures. The author ably demonstrates that horror narratives commonly serve two coexisting yet opposing functions: promoting fantasies about the nation’s ultimate innocence by displacing responsibility for domestic injustices or military aggression abroad onto some other party and insinuating, in often subtle but always unsettling ways, that one cannot evade guilt for misdeeds done in one’s name. The author makes it clear that paying close attention to works routinely dismissed as mere mindless escapism can be uncannily revealing about how unpleasant truths are publicly and privately repressed. Poole’s style shares a spirit with the sensationalism of the works he explores, and his emphasis on blunt (and sometimes reductive) assessments of complex historical phenomena and their representation in horror narratives can prove distracting. Nevertheless, the author provides persuasive commentary on the political inflections and emotional appeal of both well-known and obscure works. He is particularly insightful in probing such cultural touchstones as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jaws, and The Twilight Zone.
A lurid overview of some of the darkest dimensions of American history through the lens of the horror genre.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-436-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
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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