Professor Hofstadter, who died in 1970, intended this to be the first section of a three-volume "general interpretive synthesis of the findings of the past generation of professional historians" in American studies, to quote his proposal to the publisher. Modeled on Halevy's England in 1815, the overview moves, not through narrative, but back and forth from the particular to the conceptual and quantitative general. As social history the book is excellent. Its subjects are population and immigration, white and black servitude, the churches, religious life, and the Great Awakening, and, under the heading "The Middle-Class World," the socio-economic character and direction of the colonies at mid-century. The chapter on immigration and population is extremely well done with its emphases on the character of the labor force, on land tenure systems, and on economic development. What Hofstadter calls "the anguish of the early American experience" is delineated in the chapters on servitude: in 1750 the largest stream of new Americans was black slaves. What he terms "a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes" is examined with a sure grasp of regional differences and, again, a valuable emphasis on economic relationships (the flow of rural surplus, land speculation, international trade). The class conflicts and the reluctant impulse to independence of the 70's are left unspecified: had Hofstadter written his chapter on colonial politics perhaps this would not be the case. The most detailed section deals with religion, the "huge body of religious indifferents," and the Awakening (which is insufficiently related to conjunctural developments). Throughout Hofstadter insinuates the European origins and counterparts of secularism, indenture, the Awakening, indeed the whole bloom of Protestant nationalist capitalism. As he intended, both "students of history at various levels" and "the general educated public" will gain much from Hofstadter's appreciation of the rich, liberated aspects of the "unregulated bourgeois order" and his stress on the fact that it was "a harsh world for those without land, skill, and freedom." Had he never written anything else, we would greatly regret his loss.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1971
ISBN: 0394717953
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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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