Ambitious yet well focused—a marvelously readable study of an epic moment in American history.
Journalist Cohen (The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, 2002, etc.) delves into the New Deal archives to fashion an elucidating, pertinent and timely work on the makings of government.
The slew of progressive legislation passed during Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office in 1933 broke with the old order of laissez faire economics and redefined the nature of government’s responsibilities vis-à-vis its citizens. These policies had critics, to be sure, but they worked, Cohen notes, alleviating people’s misery during the Great Depression by offering relief, jobs and, most important, hope. While FDR largely garnered the credit for the country’s recovery—and aroused alarm with his autocratic proclamations and tactics—his handpicked minions worked tirelessly behind the scenes to forge the New Deal’s landmark programs, often by trial and error. Cohen closely examines the five members of Roosevelt’s inner circle who left the most lasting mark on the legislation forged during those 100 days, looking in turn at where they came from, how they gained the president’s trust and how they used their experience to make history. Since the banking crisis was FDR’s first concern, he chose trusted aide and speechwriter Raymond Moley to work alongside the Treasury Department on the Emergency Banking Act, which tackled the essential tension between spending more to fight the Depression and spending less to balance the budget. Budget Director Lewis Douglas, a conservative, pushed through Congress the Economy Act, a major budget-reduction measure, but he resigned in 1934 when Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace saved the farm belt with the Agricultural Adjustment Act; Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first female Cabinet member, persuaded FDR to support her ambitious progressive agenda, including workers’ rights protections; Harry Hopkins became the leading public-works administrator.
Ambitious yet well focused—a marvelously readable study of an epic moment in American history.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-196-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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