Empowering words to challenge, confront, and defy.
A highly relevant, inclusive collection of voices from the roots of resistance.
What are some of the precursors for the resistance movements that continue to gain momentum today? Editor Long (Religious Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies, Elizabethtown Coll.; Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers, 2015, etc.) collects an inspiring group of voices who have actively resisted the status quo, from the earliest dissent among Quakers in the historic petition against intolerance known as “The Flushing Remonstrance” to a March 2018 editorial entitled “We Do Not Want a Wall,” by San Diego immigration attorney Dulce Garcia. Long emphasizes that the collection “aims to document nonviolent protests that have been leftist—socially, politically, and economically—within the context of U.S. history.” Eschewing coverage of rallies by the Ku Klux Klan and those targeting Roe v. Wade, for example, the editor includes protests that promoted the abolition of slavery, the right to “free love and unregulated sex,” the rights of women and those disenfranchised, the conservation of animals, the elimination of police brutality, and so on. While there are documents by a few iconic names, such as Henry David Thoreau, Angela Y. Davis, and Naomi Klein, Long has left out some big names like Martin Luther King Jr. for “practical reasons”—i.e., securing rights to his work is difficult and expensive. Yet the result of showcasing less-well-known voices is added richness, underscoring what legendary activist Dolores Huerta notes is largely the impetus of people from “humble backgrounds” who “shoulder[ed] their way up from the bottom.” Many of the included pieces shine: Abenaki leader Loron Sauguaarum’s 1727 plainspoken document “I Have No King” explaining his honest understanding of a treaty made with the crafty English negotiators; ex-slave narratives such as Underground Railroad stationmaster Jermain Wesley Loguen’s “I Won’t Obey It!”; Margorie Swann’s autobiographical 1959 “Statement on Omaha Action” delineating her pacifist stance; and the 2015 “Eleven Reasons to Close Guantánamo” by Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA, among many others.
Empowering words to challenge, confront, and defy.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-756-7
Page Count: 652
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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