The report’s findings are shocking, and Schiff does good work in highlighting the worst of them and what needs to be done.
The long-awaited congressional report featuring a context-shaping introduction by one of the House committee’s principal members.
According to the committee, which continues to release supporting material before being dissolved in January 2023, Donald Trump stood at the center of the insurrection. “Potus im sure is loving this,” texted one Trump aide in the middle of the melee—and it certainly seemed like he was. The assault had many dimensions, with a campaign of lawsuits, election denial, and attempts to strong-arm state officials to break the law and find him more votes. Then there were the Republican legislators who aided and abetted Trump. As Vice Chair Liz Cheney writes, “Part of the tragedy of January 6th is the conduct of those who knew that what happened was profoundly wrong, but nevertheless tried to downplay it, minimize it or defend those responsible.” The report exhaustively details the coordinated attempt to install Trump by coup, from those pliant Republicans to the paramilitary groups that assembled to storm the Capitol. In the foreword to this edition, Adam Schiff, a prosecutor in the Trump impeachments and committee member, observes that the effort to overturn the election might have succeeded if Kevin McCarthy had been Speaker of the House and not Nancy Pelosi, who offered a bipartisan committee but rejected McCarthy’s choices for Republican members, among them Trump acolytes Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, who “would have turned the proceedings into a cynical circus.” Schiff singles out White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson for her brave testimony, which helped establish that Trump knew that the mob was armed but believed that “the attack was justified, even when it put the life of his own vice president, Mike Pence, in danger.” Schiff fully endorses bringing Trump to trial, recognizing that while doing so has attendant perils, “not doing so is far more dangerous.”
The report’s findings are shocking, and Schiff does good work in highlighting the worst of them and what needs to be done.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593597279
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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