Refreshingly optimistic; in our diversity lies great strength, Levin writes, a strength that can be tapped once all the...
A voice of both reason and establishment conservatism offers a prescription for renewed political discourse and bipartisan action.
You won’t hear many liberals saying that conservative voices make for healthy political balance, or vice versa. Levin (The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, 2013, etc.), founder of the journal National Affairs and a distinguished student of Edmund Burke, understands that a middle lies between left and right. The right tends to complaints of moral apocalypse and jeremiad: as the author notes, if you had told a conservative 60 years ago that out-of-wedlock birth would increase tenfold to the present, “he probably would have painted a nightmarish spectacle that would bear little resemblance to our relatively thriving society.” Conversely, the left tends to alarmist talk about economic matters, especially inequality, “in ways that suggest that the sky could fall on our society any minute.” Can there be middle ground? Yes, writes Levin, in ways that accommodate some of the best things about both traditions while decentralizing power to “create a constructive tension that can help us to make the most of democratic capitalism.” The operative word is “constructive,” and this in the place of what Levin criticizes as the tendency of both political wings to fall into golden-age nostalgia that does not admit of much action, the left for the 1960s and the right for the ’80s. Some of the author’s proposals are too lightly sketched to test, but they are interesting all the same. One example is his call to privatize certain public services but at the same time allow other public services to compete in the open market—allowing, for instance, post offices to double as banks, a note that Bernie Sanders has been sounding of late. Against “fracture and deconsolidation,” Levin even suggests that “Right” and “Left” designations may not be useful.
Refreshingly optimistic; in our diversity lies great strength, Levin writes, a strength that can be tapped once all the rancor is put aside. Highly recommended for readers of whatever political stripe.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06196-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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