As comprehensive a collection as now exists and one that should be required reading in history and literature courses.
Wide-ranging anthology of narratives and literary works related to slavery and its abolition in the U.S.
“Focusing on the voices and actions of formerly enslaved Black people and lesser-known abolitionists,” volume editor Commander writes, this collection draws on the holdings of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she is a curator. (Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg and the series editor.) Built on the Schomburg’s extensive archive of African American literature, the anthology incorporates excerpts from rare and little-known documents, among them courtroom testimonials concerning a 1740 “Negro plot” of arson and murder in New York and, 40 years later, an uprising laid at the door of “Denmark Vesey, a free black man,” which resulted in dozens of supposed conspirators being “hung on the Lines.” Other documents contrast the insurrections of John Brown and Nat Turner, the latter of whose fighters, a chronicler wrote, “were humaner than Indians or than white men fighting against Indians—there was no gratuitous outrage beyond the death-blow itself, no insult, no mutilation.” Precipitants of the Civil War, such uprisings and insurrections were far from isolated, though often accompanied by quieter acts of resistance. In 1849, for instance, one brave man shipped himself north from Louisiana to Pennsylvania in a coffinlike box, tossed and tumbled to a freedom that was not complete thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act: “I now stand before you as a free man, but since my arrival among you, I have been informed that your laws require that I should still be held as a slave.” (Fortunately, he escaped to England.) Commander’s well-chosen collection also includes literary works by Black writers such as Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who wrote a play of the Underground Railroad excerpted here whose use of dialect (“I doesn’t like to say it, but Ise might ’fraid you’s gwine to lose your gal”) is unusual among the stirring oratory of the earlier abolitionists but that certainly has its place among the dozens of voices here.
As comprehensive a collection as now exists and one that should be required reading in history and literature courses.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313608-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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