The cartoon approach helps refresh history and make it come alive. A good primer for students and a refresher course for...
An illustrated history of the early United States, narrated by Uncle Sam.
As the straightforward title suggests, there is nothing artistically radical or subversive here, just a straightforward account of the development of the United States, from the landing of the Pilgrims through the establishment of the colonies and to the issues of states’ rights and slavery that would split the nation in the Civil War (where Volume 2 will resume the narrative). The decision by children’s and young-adult book author Ashby (Young Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, 2009) to focus on 20 documents might make the material seem dry, but the panels from Colón (Inner Sanctum: Tales of Horror, Mystery and Suspense, 2011, etc.) highlight how much discussion, debate, argument and even warfare went into each. Ashby also doesn’t limit the focus to the greatest hits—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—but shows the importance of less-familiar writings such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, “perhaps the most influential publication in American history.” Paine’s more obscure The American Crisis also receives its due. What the narrative makes plain is how much of what citizens take for granted was initially the source of so much controversy. Early on, “most Americans—even the Founding Fathers—still thought of themselves first and foremost as citizens of their home states, not the United States.” Among the colonists, religious freedom and even free speech were contentious issues rather than essential liberties; the decision to declare independence from England was by no means unanimous; and the balance between the state and federal governments remained precarious. The narrative doesn’t sugarcoat history, as it shows how the capitulation on the slavery issue, deemed necessary for these states to be united, made civil war inevitable and how the Indian Removal Act also betrayed the equality that was a founding principle.
The cartoon approach helps refresh history and make it come alive. A good primer for students and a refresher course for their parents.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9460-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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