Some compelling insights, combined with sketchy details, make for an uneasy historical mix.
An overview of six utopian dreams that have defined American society, beginning with the first European settlers and concluding with the present-day New Economy and our Internet-obsessed culture.
Karabell (The Last Campaign, 2000) argues that Americans are convinced that the construction of an ideal society meeting every need is possible; we need only, we believe, find the right vision. As each American dream is supplanted by another, decades of accumulated wisdom are cast aside in our rush to embrace the new guiding paradigm. Puritans striving to create an Edenic City on a Hill were eclipsed by colonists promoting the principles of liberty, freedom, and independence. The colonial vision of individualism was surpassed by the image of national unity, commerce, and industry. After the Civil War, the paradigm of unity gave way to one of territorial expansion, which in turn led to the apex of governmental activism. Distrust of big government then prefaced the present New Economy. Karabell sets a difficult task for himself in describing four centuries of utopian thought: the chapter regarding the rise of government gets especially short shrift, meriting only 32 pages and covering roughly 150 years. (The 1950s, for example, are summed up in a single paragraph.) Conversely, the New Economy and Internet sections take up nearly half the work. The author believes that the New Economy will collapse because it does not offer spiritual fulfillment; this will lead to a seventh stage of “techgnosis” (a blending of science and spirituality). Unfortunately, too many facts and not enough depth hamper the author’s intriguing premise: the dot-coms, for example, collapsed not because they lacked a spiritual component but because the market had to correct the abnormal dominance of speculative ventures. Additionally, there is no mention of the growing fundamentalist Christian population within the information-technology community.
Some compelling insights, combined with sketchy details, make for an uneasy historical mix.Pub Date: July 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-97857-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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