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IN OUR OWN WORDS

EXTRAORDINARY SPEECHES OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

The last hundred years” worth of our most historical, powerful—and progressive—verbal addresses. The co-editors have very different qualifications. Senator Torricelli (D-N.J.) gives newsworthy speeches to congressional committees and the media, while Carroll has edited a similar centennial anthology, Letters of a Nation (1997, not reviewed). Arranged by decade, the collection features such early speakers as Teddy Roosevelt riding rough on Muck-Rakers, a Tammany Hall defense of “Honest Graft,” W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington previewing Malcolm X (“revolution is hostile”), and the inimitable Mark Twain advising girls to smoke, drink, and marry “in moderation—[for instance,] only one cigar at a time.” Humor is rare here, but the collection offers the drama of hearing both sides of the debates over Prohibition, the League of Nations, evolution in the schools, isolationism, McCarthyism, segregation, the success of the U.S.S.R., the Vietnam war (three to one against), the women’s movement, rock lyric warnings, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill brouhaha, and gun control. Despite the apparent symmetry, there’s a plurality of voices for progressive, liberal, and even anarchist causes. Two Native Americans and several blacks denounce white racism; anarchist Emma Goldman derides patriotism; Helen Keller, Paul Robeson, and Jane Fonda laud Communism; a Berkeley student champions free speech; Cesar Chavez and others have a grape to pick with Labor; and we hear supporters of social spending, prison reform, abortion, AIDS victims, drug addicts, and sundry politically correct minorities. The eulogies for FDR and the Kennedys are apolitical, but Democrats are over-represented and Republicans (from Goldwater to Nixon and Agnew) demonized. Ending the book with the eloquence of Edward R. Murrow (who’s here), Tom Brokaw remarks on the century that “it is not enough to wire the world if you short-circuit the soul.” For a progressive Democrat, the sound bites of the century.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-56836-291-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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