A first-rate history, freshly told, with every promise of becoming a standard text.
American history as epic: the first volume of a projected trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian.
“The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years,” writes McDougall (Promised Land, Crusader State, 1997, etc.) in an opening salvo, adding that the continent “today hosts the mightiest, richest, most dynamic civilization in history.” But McDougall is no mere booster: attempting to steer a middle course, as he puts it, between the leftist histories of Howard Zinn and the rightist ones of Paul Johnson, he qualifies such statements letter by letter, carefully explaining why they should be received as true. North America, he writes, was a glittering prize, sought after for many reasons, one of them the European hunger for new farmland at a time when the agricultural market was rapidly growing and England alone had seen a “fourfold increase in prices for foodstuffs between 1540 to 1640.” That the English won this prize over the French and Spanish would have profound effects for subsequent world history. McDougall builds a sturdy narrative out of telling incidents and details: the arrival of English settlers by the thousands in the Virginia colony in the early 1620s, prompting an Indian uprising and a royal lawsuit alike; the prevalence of “smuggling, bribes, and fraudulent bookkeeping” in the economy of early New England, and competition for jobs with moonlighting British soldiers as yet another reason New Englanders resented the crown; the enticements offered to workers on the Erie Canal, adding up to not only the handsome wage of 80 cents a day, but also “a shot of whiskey every two hours, and all the eggs, pork, potatoes, and bread they could eat.” Throughout these details McDougall steadily works large themes, such as the “English notion of a racial hierarchy justifying expulsion or enslavement of lesser breeds”—an ideology Americans eagerly adopted in centuries to come.
A first-rate history, freshly told, with every promise of becoming a standard text.Pub Date: April 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-019789-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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