A judicious but generally somewhat lackluster history of ``the People's War.'' Although O'Neill (History/Rutgers; American High, 1986, etc.) derives his material entirely from secondary sources, he gives a nuanced and comprehensive account of the period—and also a somewhat revisionist one, particularly in his approval of FDR's policy toward the Soviet Union. O'Neill argues that no degree of advance planning could have generated terms more favorable to the West than Roosevelt managed to win, and that the President adopted a ``delicate balancing act'' toward Stalin in refusing to discuss postwar aid (with the intent of making that aid dependent on Soviet cooperation) and in keeping the atomic bomb a secret (a decision frustrated by Soviet spies). Moreover, regarding FDR's strategy prior to the entry of the US in the war, O'Neill notes ``the odd dialectic between President and people, in which FDR gave assurance he did not mean, and they pretended to believe him.'' The author believes that, in not understanding the full threat of Germany to American interests, it was ``American democracy that failed the test, not just, or even particularly, the American President.'' On the other hand, O'Neill judges American policy toward Japan harshly, contending that ``bad as America's diplomacy was, its defenses were even worse,'' and that Roosevelt's preoccupation with keeping power and with creating overlapping and confused bureaucracies caused the US to lose a year in preparing for war. But even so, O'Neill argues that FDR's highhanded style of government was crucial to his success, given the American system of government and the intensity of its partisan politics. A worthwhile history, particularly of political and military matters—but flawed somewhat by O'Neill's 1990's sensibility regarding issues of race, sex, etc., which isn't always fully sensitive to the very different mores that prevailed 50 years ago.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-923678-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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