Literate and lucid—sure to interest to readers of Fukuyama, Huntington, and similar authors as well as students of modern...
Americans are “serial amnesiacs” who have forgotten the hardest of hard times—which will serve us poorly when the hard times return.
The ancient Greeks made the dramatic form of tragedy central to their cultural expression, write Brands (Global Affairs/Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump, 2018, etc.) and Edel (United States Studies Centre, Univ. of Sydney; Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic, 2014, etc.), as both admonition and inspiration. “An understanding of tragedy,” they note, “remains indispensable—as it always has been—to the conduct of statecraft and the preservation of world order.” One central facet of tragedy is that hubris will get a person in trouble; another is that it’s never correct to assume you’re in control of any situation. Given receding memories of the Cold War and the world wars, many ordinary Americans and policymakers alike have lost the awareness that, in the authors’ view, the story of international relations over the centuries “has been one of recurring geopolitical cataclysms in which peace is ruptured, nations are shattered, countless lives are lost or disrupted, and golden eras come crashing to an end.” It’s the stuff of Aeschylus and Thucydides but also of the current headlines, in which the American assumption that democracies are allies and autocracies and authoritarian states suspect is giving way to global illiberalism and the competing geopolitical demands of states such as Russia and China. A properly formed tragic sense, the authors hold, instructs that rivalries between great powers can easily lead to war between them, “a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.” Other aspects of the tragic sense include recognizing the need for personal sacrifice and communal action and seeing clearly the world for what it is, “especially when the outlook is ominous.”
Literate and lucid—sure to interest to readers of Fukuyama, Huntington, and similar authors as well as students of modern realpolitik.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-23824-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2019
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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