With deep reporting and strong analysis, this might emerge as the definitive title on a hugely consequential election.
Three experienced D.C. reporters chronicle last year’s campaign.
This isn’t the first behind-the-scenes look at the recent presidential race, but it’s among the sturdiest, a well-sourced, process-oriented account that shows how inertia and missed opportunities deflated the Democrats. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both parties and “alumni” from former President Barack Obama’s team, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf, who cover politics for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, respectively, write that Democrats made crucial decisions “by default.” In a chapter titled “Sleepwalking,” they write, “Joe Biden decided to run for reelection by not deciding. He told aides: I’m running until I tell you I’m not. And he never told them he wasn’t.” Staffers didn’t want to look disloyal by suggesting he reconsider, “so no one ever said anything.” Later, one-time Obama staffers, worried about Biden’s chances, “looked for a diplomatic way to offer free assistance” on “specific projects.” Biden’s team promised to be in touch, but the collaboration never happened. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, vented about Biden’s apparent lack of urgency: “I have no fucking clue why he’s going to Camp David this weekend” instead of “working the phones” to reassure nervous Democrats. The reporters’ sources close to Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the nominee after Biden left the race, describe similar frustrations with her campaign’s sluggish decision-making and failure to challenge allegations made by Donald Trump. The authors find little new to write about Trump, retelling how criminal indictments and assassination attempts worked to his advantage and describing his staunchest supporters’ belief that God is looking out for him. But this is an excusable shortcoming in a substantive effort that’s ideal for readers reluctant to read multiple books on the subject.
With deep reporting and strong analysis, this might emerge as the definitive title on a hugely consequential election.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593832530
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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