A timely, stirring history.
The impact of collective activism.
Bancroft Prize–winning historian Gordon considers critical changes in American life through an examination of seven movements that arose from the 1890s through the 1970s. These examples of “large-scale, participatory activism” include the settlement house movement of the 1890s; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and fascist groups in the 1920s; campaigns for old-age pensions and unemployment relief in the 1930s; the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, which began the Civil Rights movement; the United Farm Workers movement of the 1960s; and women’s consciousness raising in the 1970s. Besides profiling movement leaders, Gordon pays close attention to what she calls their “followership,” individuals not usually identified as leaders but who developed and promoted strategies and tactics that enabled movements to succeed. Her well-populated history contains familiar figures (Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez) but mostly surprises. In recounting the growth of settlement houses, for example, which burgeoned to 74 residences by 1897, Gordon’s well-known history of Hull-House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and supported by wealthy white women, is complemented by the history of Phillis Wheatley Home in Cleveland, founded by Jane Edna Hunter, the daughter of a formerly enslaved mother, to serve migrant Black women. In the 1930s, two movements arose to address economic distress: the Townsend movement, launched by a feisty retired California physician, Dr. Francis Townsend, which resulted in the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 and identified old age as “a political identity,” and a struggling campaign for unemployment relief, which “engendered hopefulness and a sense of efficacy,” despite facing many obstacles. Whether they effect lasting change, social movements generate camaraderie, solidarity, and the shared conviction that “risks are worth taking.”
A timely, stirring history.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781631493713
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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