Not in the musicological class of Alan Lomax or at the historical heights of David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom,...
Historian Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, 2018, etc.) teams up with country star McGraw to chart the course of American patriotic music from the Revolution to the present.
Significant events in American life have always had a soundtrack. Bruce Springsteen was ready with “My City of Ruins” when 9/11 occurred, having already recorded it, but it would be a while before Neil Young would release “Let’s Roll” and Alan Jackson would craft “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning?)” As McGraw writes of the songs on Springsteen’s album The Rising in one of the scattered sidebars in which he offers commentary on Meacham’s text, “it’s understandable how these songs have come to be anthems for the brave men and women of the New York fire and police departments.” Neither the main text nor McGraw’s commentary goes particularly deep, and if there’s a thesis, it might be in Meacham’s closing: “The whole panoply of America can be traced—and, more important, heard and felt—in the songs that echo through our public squares.” The authors are agreeably inclusive in their repertoire, from “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome“ to "Over There" and “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the last of which, McGraw holds, invokes pride, adding, “maybe it’s not cool to say that.” Some songs are well known, such as “Yankee Doodle,” while readers will be glad to know some of the less-remembered tunes of the Revolution, such as “The Liberty Song.” A nice touch comes when Meacham puts the Cuban missile crisis in the context of Bob Dylan’s discography: If the missiles had flown, he notes, it’s possible that “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” “would be the last song Dylan would ever write."
Not in the musicological class of Alan Lomax or at the historical heights of David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom, but worthy reading for the anthemically minded.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13295-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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