A notable effort, essential for the study of the civil-rights movement.
A collection of primary, hitherto unknown documents in the history of the civil-rights movement.
Drawing on archival materials available only 40 years after the fact, and centering on a trove of audiotapes now housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, historians Rosenberg and Karabell (Parting the Desert, p. 443, etc.) offer a fly-on-the-wall view of the often tense, often combative stance of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in pressing for equality across the land. One question to ask of those documents early on, the editors suggest, is this: “Why did Kennedy and Johnson come to believe that civil rights reform was the single most important domestic issue facing the nation and decide it was worth fighting for?” Both presidents, after all, had much to lose in potentially alienating the South. Yet, as is clear from the transcripts of meetings and telephone conversations presented here, both Kennedy and Johnson took to the cause, often playing hardball to get their point across, as when Kennedy clashed with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett over James Meredith’s effort to enroll in the state university in 1962. (Kennedy: “I’d like to get assurances from you that the state police will take positive action to maintain law and order.” Barnett: “Oh, they’ll do that.” Kennedy: “Then we’ll know what we have to do.”) Kennedy may not have always known the players—at one point he wonders who Dick Gregory is, asking, “Is he highly regarded by the Negroes”?—but his heart was clearly in the right place, as was Johnson, who emerges from these pages, as from Robert Caro’s recent Master of the Senate, as a consummate politician not afraid of breaking a few bones while engaging in a little friendly arm-twisting. The result, of course, was the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A notable effort, essential for the study of the civil-rights movement.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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.
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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