A provocative argument that wealthy men built America and did a good job.
An ingenious examination of how money played the central role in the founding of the United States.
As prolific historian Shachtman (How the French Saved America: Soldiers, Sailors, Diplomats, Louis XVI, and the Success of a Revolution, 2017, etc.) points out, fighting Britain was extremely expensive. Lacking the power to tax, the Continental Congress performed terribly in their efforts to supply the army, but this obscures the fact that it spent a great deal of money and many men got rich. Partly, this was inherent in the primitive administration of 18th-century governments. Paid no salary, officials took a commission from money that passed through their hands, a practice that encouraged corruption. It was also not illegal to mix public and private business, so officials purchased from themselves or their friends. Due to slow communication and scanty legal protection, merchants and buyers relied on promises, personal guarantees, risky loans, and favors. Genuinely patriotic merchants like Robert Morris, as well as less admirable figures, took terrible risks and often suffered for it. Morris died poor. The feeble confederation that followed independence exasperated those concerned with foreign affairs, trade, raising capital, and collecting debts but not the average American. Shachtman emphasizes that no mass movement demanded change. The Constitution was championed “by a very small subset of the country’s wealthy. If we add to the fifty-five men who attended the Constitutional Convention, twice or three times that number of nondelegates who later took the lead in urging ratification…the total is at best a few hundred men.” They looked after their own interests, and their priorities were social order, contracts, collecting debts, and a strong currency. However, as the author shows, unlike the ultrawealthy today, most embraced equality of opportunity. Shachtman carries his account past the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who opposed powerful governments, banks, and (in theory) great wealth. Despite this, the author maintains that his elimination of taxes and regulations increased equality of opportunity without inconveniencing the rich, and America prospered.
A provocative argument that wealthy men built America and did a good job.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16476-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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