A must for the look-it-up shelf and a poignant reminder of how far we have come—and have yet to go.
A stirring chronology of advances—and some backward steps—in the long struggle for African-American civil rights.
The subtitle is a touch imprecise, for Martin Luther King is still alive at the beginning of Gates (African-American Studies/Harvard Univ.; Finding Your Roots, 2014, etc.) and Burke’s compendium, a companion to the forthcoming PBS series. It is Malcolm X, instead, who falls just two pages in, a victim of an internal struggle within the Black Muslim movement. As the authors observe, his memoir soon became “a canonical text for the Black Power movement,” selling 6 million copies within 10 years. Ten days after Malcolm’s funeral, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten in Selma, Alabama, launching King’s march to Montgomery and affirming the commitment of the Lyndon Johnson administration to civil rights at the federal level. Two dozen pages in, and King has fallen as well, killed at the age of 39, “the same age Malcolm X was when he was assassinated three years prior.” The year 1968 would mark much upheaval, symbolized by medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raising of the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics. Gates and Burke chart political and social events alongside the incalculable influence of black culture on mainstream American culture, from Broadway (James Earl Jones, “long before he is known as the voice of Darth Vader,” won a Tony in 1969) to music (“Although most of the audience is white, African American performers star at the three-day Woodstock music festival in upstate New York”) to sports and science, the latter represented most visibly by the immensely popular interpreter of cosmology Neil deGrasse Tyson. Presented in accessible entries seldom exceeding 100 words, the chronology is richly illustrated with images both iconic and seldom seen, making this especially useful as a visual reference for readers too young to have scenes from the early years burned into their memories.
A must for the look-it-up shelf and a poignant reminder of how far we have come—and have yet to go.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242700-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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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