An entertaining narrative of events that have received more thorough treatment elsewhere.
In his debut, Washington Post assistant foreign editor Englund takes a close look at a month “that wrenched America toward a new course."
This was the month immediately before Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to take America into World War I. Wilson, the book's central figure, was initially determined to keep America neutral but was also relentlessly drawn to the conclusion that escalating German attacks on American shipping required the nation to join the hostilities. Early in the month, the first Russian revolution broke out and the hapless Czar Nicholas II abdicated, thus eliminating the embarrassing prospect of Americans fighting for democracy alongside an absolute despotism. Supporting players in the drama include Theodore Roosevelt, fulminating for a war he would not be permitted to join; Jeannette Rankin, the first American congresswoman, who wanted to focus on obtaining suffrage for women but first had to decide how to vote on going to war; H.L. Mencken, the Germanophile journalist who spent March in Cuba covering a farcical failed revolution; and James Reese Europe, a pioneering jazz and military band leader. Englund is an accomplished storyteller, and he well captures the spirit of the time: in Russia, where the exhilaration and confusion as the nation stumbled toward a humiliating separate peace with Germany and a second revolution; in America, full of anxiety and anticipation as the country slid reluctantly into war. The author also ably portrays the unfortunate misperceptions about emerging Russian democracy. Englund’s self-imposed time frame proves constraining, however. The events of March were, of course, the culmination of earlier developments that require and receive full explanation, particularly the resumption by Germany of unrestricted submarine warfare and the now-famous Zimmermann telegram. The coverage of Rankin's congressional debut effectively displays the distressing split that the prospect of war caused in the ranks of the suffragists, but the adventures of Mencken and James Europe seem of only tangential relevance.
An entertaining narrative of events that have received more thorough treatment elsewhere.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-29208-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 Yorkerstaff 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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