An insightful study of the birth of the American empire and the resulting “American century.”
A broad-ranging history of America’s early evolution as a world power, a more deliberate process than is often supposed.
In this second volume of the Dangerous Nation trilogy, Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes that late-19th-century America was a kind of conservative paradise. With a tiny military to support, taxes were low, and isolation “meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making.” In this regime, foreign policy was an afterthought. That began to change with the war with Spain in 1898, which in some ways was a foregone conclusion, for even if Americans were not broadly interested in the outside world, they didn’t mind going to war—and Cuba, at least in the eyes of the Founding Fathers, was “a natural appendage of the growing country.” Seizing former Spanish possessions also helped curb other nations’ designs. Germany, for instance, clearly wanted the Philippines after occupying Chinese territory in 1898 and touching off a colonial land grab throughout East Asia. The U.S. clung to the Philippines not just to deny the archipelago to other powers, but also to civilize—in Protestant terms, of course—what William Howard Taft called “our little brown brothers.” Germany faded from the scene in Asia, but it soon turned to the project of a comprehensive “domination of Europe.” Again, Americans didn’t much care, and after World War I, the nation fell into “a profoundly anti-liberal mood” that supposed that democracy was doomed, a mood that Axis powers used to their advantage. Kagan cogently examines what he considers certain inevitabilities (e.g., the attack on Pearl Harbor) while delivering novel interpretations of events. For example, he suggests that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union earlier than intended in order to inspire the Japanese attack, which he supposed, incorrectly, would tie up the American military in the Pacific and keep it out of Europe.
An insightful study of the birth of the American empire and the resulting “American century.”Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780307262943
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
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
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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