A comprehensive and vividly narrated history, enriched by well-chosen illustrations, that is as much an epic-in-progress as...
From historians in the field, ten essays (a few of them pedestrian in style or leftist in perspective) chronologically detailing the history of African-Americans from their arrival in the New World to the present—a dark story, unfortunately, relieved by a few radiant moments of hope.
In the preface, Kelly and Lewis make some rather sweeping Afrocentric claims (that black labor, for example, helped give birth to capitalism), but—with the exception of the two last essays—the rest of their study offers nuanced commentary and perceptive insights. The first essay, “The First Passage 1502–1617,” details the origins of slavery and reads like a college textbook, but Peter Wood's “Strange New Land 1617–1776” is an elegant and vivid account of the years in which slavery was transformed from a potentially temporary condition to a race-based and increasingly permanent state. The essays offer brief vignettes of the famous—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King—as well as portraits of ordinary men and women (`I had a kind master, but I didn't know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found I could get my freedom, I was very glad,` one former slave observed). Well-chosen facts illustrate the relevant periods and the constantly evolving nature of the black struggle: in Georgia during the Revolutionary War, a third of the slaves took advantage of the British invasion to escape; in New Jersey, slaves were not freed until nearly 30 years after the Declaration of Independence; during the 1930s, Federal intervention caused black illiteracy to drop by ten percent. The last two essays, which cover the recent present, reflect the political bias of Kelly and Lewis and offer a benign take on the Black Panther's attempts at armed insurrection while scanting the achievements of General Colin Powell.
A comprehensive and vividly narrated history, enriched by well-chosen illustrations, that is as much an epic-in-progress as a scholarly record. (color and b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-513945-3
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
