Richard Hofstadter lends his historian's craft to the rather popular task of anthologizing American violence, and whatever reservations one may have about collections of umpteen separate bloody incidents, the master's hand is evident throughout. Hofstadter's thoughtful introduction gives a scholarly substance to the whole subject, delineating and expounding upon the major chronic forms of group violence in America, marking out the significant areas which invite further research, and reflecting upon the particular forms of violence that flourished in the 1960's. He regrets the rising mystique of armed struggle on the left, since force "has more characteristically served domineering capitalists or trigger-happy police, peremptory sergeants or fascist hoodlums." But "the hideous and gratuitous official violence in Vietnam" has eroded the effectiveness of appeals to peaceful protest. The 107 documentary selections have been divided as well as could be managed into eight varieties of violence—political, economic, racial, religious-ethnic, anti-radical and police, personal, assassinations and terrorism, and "Violence in the Name of Law, Order, and Morality." They are primarily eyewitness or newspaper accounts, "of distinctly reportorial character and value, rather than editorialized." Hofstadter and his younger associate Wallace provide introductory remarks for each separate piece, confined largely to the episode at hand, and cite additional pertinent references. If, as Hofstadter asserts, "the rediscovery of our violence will undoubtedly be one of the important intellectual legacies of the 1960's," then this is among the better places to linger over that legacy.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0394716868
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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