An enticing guide to the museum’s extensive exhibits.
A literary companion to the Smithsonian’s soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Jumping from history to culture in an earnest attempt to be inclusive, this lavishly illustrated work by the museum’s staff and editor Conwill highlights the museum’s collection, which has been steadily gathered since 2005 and will open to the public in September 2016 in its imposing new space on the Washington Mall. The contributors to this excellent resource are stellar—e.g., “sage adviser” John Hope Franklin (now deceased)—and they move beyond the stereotypes embedded in scholarship throughout the eras to bring a fresh sense of how African-Americans contributed mightily to the overall “great American dream” and changed it for the better. The enslavement of Africans and their importation to the New World in the 17th century mark the beginning of this tortuous journey, and the editors take readers up to the Civil War in handsome layouts featuring photographs of the collection, such as items owned by slaves and short bios of notable figures like abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison and crusader Sojourner Truth. Eloquent poems help break up the brisk historical tone, and the superb scholarship continues in chapters dealing with Reconstruction and black migration, as well as “Making a Way Out of No Way,” which concerns the building of institutions that allowed African-Americans to get educated (e.g., Howard University, Tuskegee Institute) and succeed in life (churches, businesses, newspapers). Interim chapters on military participation and sporting heroes (male and female) make an awkward juxtaposition against the chronology, while the last chapter on “African American Influence on American Culture” is dazzling. Some of the contributors include Yale historian David Blight, museum supervisory curator Elaine Nichols, renowned scholar Peniel Joseph, and author Tonya Bolden, among others.
An enticing guide to the museum’s extensive exhibits.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58834-568-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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