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MANY THOUSANDS GONE

THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES OF SLAVERY IN NORTH AMERICA

In a real contribution to the literature of American slavery, Berlin (History/Univ. of Maryland, College Park; co-editor, Families and Freedom, 1997) sketches the complex evolution of that institution in the American colonies and the early US. Berlin divides his account into three periods in which, he contends, slaves had vastly different experiences: the charter generations, made up of the first arrivals in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and their descendants; the plantation generations, which comprised the intermediate generations that cultivated the great staples on which the colonial American economy was based; and the revolutionary generations, which consisted of those who sought freedom in the wake of the promise of the American Revolution. In so doing, Berlin traces the development of a “society with slaves”—that is, in which slavery was a marginal institution that represented only one among many labor sources—into a “slave society” in which slavery was not only central to the economy but formed the basis of all social institutions. In societies with slaves, such as the northern US, slaves enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy, maintained their identity as Africans to a large extent, owned property, often negotiated with their masters over the terms of their enslavement, and sometimes ultimately obtained their freedom. In the deep South by contrast, the evolution of the society with slaves into a slave society was accelerated by the emergence of a planter class and consolidated by the growth of cotton as a mass export crop. Here plantation slavery began to assume the patriarchal and corporate features familiar to us today. However, as the author notes, at the beginning of the 19th century, “the vast majority of black people, slave and free, did not reside in the black belt, grow cotton, or subscribe to Christianity.” A cogently argued, well-researched narrative that points to the complex nature of American slavery, the falsity of many of our stereotypes, and the unique world wrought by the slaves themselves. (4 illustrations, 4 maps)

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1998

ISBN: 0-674-81092-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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