A searing indictment of racism in Texas, past and present.
Bills, a veteran journalist, exposes the history of racism and violence in Texas in this nonfiction work.
“They say the victors write the history,” the author observes, “but here in Texas…We also ‘white’ the history, forgetting the diversity that ensured our victories.” A product of Texas public schools, Bills was “shocked” in college to discover the narrative of the state’s history he had been taught left students with “historical unawareness and utter obliviousness.” In the course of 10 vignettes, this book seeks to expose a history of racism and violence to dispel the rampant mythologization of the Lone Star State. Each of the book’s 10 stories pair a historical event with a parallel narrative from the present (referencing the Covid-19 pandemic, a chapter on the Laredo Smallpox Riot of 1898 explores the impact of systemic racism on public health from the 19th to the 21st century). As in many of the book’s chapters, this retelling of a historical crisis emphasizes the role of the state in maintaining white supremacy through violence (in this case, confrontations between Texas Rangers and Mexican Americans). Though this is a brutal history, the text also emphasizes the courageous actions of activists like Jovita Idar, an acclaimed suffragist and immigrant rights advocate. Another chapter juxtaposes the heroism of Frank J. Robinson, an East Texas civil rights activist who rallied Black voters in the 1960s and 1970s, with the cowardly actions of an unknown white assassin who murdered Robinson, and a corrupt justice system that ruled his death a suicide. Multiple chapters examine the prevalence of lynching in Texas history, with local law enforcement agencies complicit in the murders. While many of the events covered may be well known to scholars of Black history, and are not difficult to find in the primary source records, Bills underlines the roles of censorship, myth-making, and “white fragility” in preventing such atrocities from entering the public consciousness. Even the author’s own efforts at commemorating those killed by acts of racial violence through the installation of historical markers were sidelined, derailed, or delayed by bureaucratic red tape.
An award-winning freelance journalist and author of multiple books on Texas history, Bills has a firm grasp on the state’s past and its warped self-perception, and he bolsters his analysis with more than 100 endnotes and a nine-page bibliography. The book’s lack of a chronological throughline (and jumps between multiple time periods within each chapter) may be dizzying to some readers, but overall, the text balances sound research with a harrowing narrative and biting commentary. Ample photographs and newspaper clippings further immerse readers in the milieu. Texas history is also used as a lens through which the author explores larger trends in the American story; each chapter features historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Ida B. Wells, who link events in Texas to a larger narrative of American anti-immigrant sentiment, white supremacy, and racial discrimination. “Sometimes, when you confront the past,” he warns readers, “the past confronts you back.” A searing indictment of racism in Texas, past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781467154345
Page Count: 160
Publisher: The History Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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