A profound work about the Black experience and white oppression.
The long road to achieving Black pride.
From start to finish, Hawkins’ autobiography is a harrowing and insightful overview of what child abuse looks like from the perspective of a scared Black boy who grows up to become a proud Black man. Making the persuasive claim that Black youths who are emotionally and physically abused by their parents are also victims of white oppression (what he calls a “bondage belief system”), Hawkins sees his scornful father and mother as products of their family histories, which were rife with whippings, hangings, rapes, and other forms of unspeakable violence at the hands of whites, who had Black people perpetuate these heinous acts on their own friends and family. Hawkins is honest in his descriptions of what his parents called his “spankings,” which once involved Hawkins’ father stepping on his son’s neck with his steel-toed boot. Relating these horrific incidents acts as a form of catharsis and a way to relay to readers that, on the basis of his research on his family in Alabama, his parents were victims of “Jim Crow apartheid” in the South, which led to their belligerence and their skewed belief that the injuries they inflicted were for their children’s protection. Hawkins does not bestow forgiveness in this work, but he does leave readers with a better understanding of unhealthy forms of love and the genealogies that produce them.
A profound work about the Black experience and white oppression.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780062823168
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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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