A well-argued, fresh way to look at America’s role in the world from the founding until today.
Revisionist history of the U.S. in world geopolitics.
Russell builds on his Renegade History of the United States (2010) with a wide-ranging study that is less contrarian than contradictorian. The contradiction comes from two fundamental American impulses. The first is Puritanism, that haunting fear, as Mencken put it, that someone is having fun out there. The second is precisely that fun and the democratic vision that underlies it: “its exports were not sermons but songs, not codes of conduct but offers of emancipation.” From the first, Russell writes, high-minded folk, such as John Adams, worried that Americans would not retain the discipline necessary to stage a revolution and build a nation, given the temptations of drink and debauchery in plain view. Like many a Founder, Adams held a vision of an American empire. So did Thomas Jefferson, whose “first act as president was to go to war” to combat the Barbary pirates. The bugaboo in all this was none other than capitalism, which “contained dangerous contradictions for an ambitious head of state.” Capitalism required discipline and subservience, but it also required consumerist impulses, so that it was “at once puritanical and libertine.” Everywhere American power and capitalism traveled, whether in the brutal conquest of the Philippines or the wars on Europe’s Western Front and in Vietnam, American pop culture followed, decried everywhere it went: Hitler excoriated jazz, the Politburo hated rock ’n’ roll, the secret police of the Japanese Empire tried to suppress homegrown flappers, and both Communists and Nationalists tried to keep Chinese women away from lipstick. Ironically, then, Russell raises the question: “If jazz, rock, ‘vulgar’ movies and blue jeans helped bring down Communism, why were they not celebrated by American political leaders as a beacon of freedom?” Because they threatened American puritanical authoritarians today, as witness the ongoing culture wars.
A well-argued, fresh way to look at America’s role in the world from the founding until today.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9780802128218
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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