A fairly inspiring, mostly traditional work of early American history.
A history of how the Constitution was put into practice.
Allen (1929-2018) accepts the myth that Americans disliked the weak Articles of Confederation, which guided the Colonies through and after the Revolution. In fact, most Americans, from farmers to city workers, had few objections. Only the educated elite—northern lawyers and businessmen, southern planters—hated dealing with 13 separate currencies, banks, commercial regulations, and legal systems. Assembling in in 1787, they cobbled together the Constitution, a mixture of specific and ambiguous guidelines for a more or less democratic central government. That was the easy part. Assembling a functioning government from these guidelines was exceedingly difficult. However, it’s fun to read about, and readers will enjoy Allen’s lively account of what followed as the first Congress assembled in New York in spring 1789 and welcomed the first president. After inventing a ceremonial inauguration, it spent the following two years inventing the federal government literally from scratch. While George Washington invented the presidency, the House and Senate, notes the author, “completed a dizzying list of tasks, creating the departments of State, Treasury, and War, devising a federal judiciary system…building a financial structure for raising and collecting taxes and tariffs; approving a plan for funding foreign and domestic war debts.” Congress members also established a national bank, patent office, and navy (but no army), conducted a census, passed the Bill of Rights, and allowed Washington to move the capital to “somewhere along the Potomac River in Virginia.” Allen doesn’t delve deeply enough into the issue of slavery, but he provides a solid overview of how early leaders mostly came together to create a new system of government. Fergus Bordewich’s The First Congress is perhaps the best popular account of the foundation of the U.S. government, but this is a worthy competitor.
A fairly inspiring, mostly traditional work of early American history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781538183090
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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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