This eloquent blend of history and advocacy journalism ends with a follow-up on the major figures and with that rarest...
An intimate yet broad presentation of the slow gains made in racial reconciliation in today's South.
Davidson (Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control, 1993, etc.) offers a study of racial tensions in the contemporary South as reflected in the lives and thought of two school board members in Durham, N.C. Ann Atwater was a black civil rights advocate, while C.P. Ellis was, when they first encountered each other, a Ku Klux Klansman. Needless to say, they held deeply polarized positions on race, class, and, specifically, school desegregation. Durham is an appropriate backdrop to the unfolding drama of their confrontation, as it promised much and delivered little to the families of both Atwater and Ellis. The Dukes' tobacco money never filtered though to the poor Ellis family in this "Magic City,'' nor did the capital of "Negro Progress'' make life easier for the Atwaters. Ann's progression out of poverty was painfully slow. To C.P., civil rights legislation seemed part of a plot by blacks and Communists who were, in the words of the Ku Klux Klan, "bent on destroying the white race through economic oppression and intermarriage.'' Davidson skillfully reveals how the rhetoric of the Klan has had such a profound effect on poor whites. It took violent rioting in the wake of the King assassination and a violent confrontation between Ellis and Atwater at a school board meeting to shock C.P. out of his old ways. He realized that the people he had been taught to view as enemies had a just cause. More important, both Atwater and Ellis came to accept that they shared a common struggle against Durham's rich and powerful, a struggle in which they had a greater chance of victory if they worked together.
This eloquent blend of history and advocacy journalism ends with a follow-up on the major figures and with that rarest quality in a book on race in America—a reason for hope.Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-19759-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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