For Professor Sowell (Sociology, UCLA) ethnic America presents "a story of many very different heritages. . . the story of the human spirit in its many guises." Yet underneath the story lies the moral—never clearly stated—that America is truly the land of opportunity. In his all-too-rapid summarizing of ethnic histories ("Jewish Americans Today" receives less than two pages), Sowell searches out evidence (almost all from secondary sources) to present ethnicity in favorable light. Thus, the Irish may have developed their urban political machines, but "they were by no means the originators of corrupt politics. They were simply more successful at it, and performed with a warmer human touch." The Germans "quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness" and became renowned as "the nation's best dirt farmers." While Jews originally had to live in overcrowded tenements like other immigrant arrivals, their cleanliness protected them from some slum diseases; and, while they saw education as a route to success, their co-arrivals, the Italians, devalued education but got ahead through their willingness to work harder. The real success story, though, is presented by the Japanese, "emerging from war-time internment to earn median incomes 32 percent above the national average." With the blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans, Sowell faces a more difficult task in demonstrating progress, but rises to it. "Their rates of progress" he reminds us, "look very different if measured from 1619, 1865, 1900, or 1954." Assuming the long perspective, he sees the black race as a whole as having "moved from a position of utter destitution—in money, knowledge, and rights—to a place alongside other groups emerging in the great struggles of life." For Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well, it all depends on your perspective. Most mainland Puerto Rican adults are still first generation, and "Few groups in American history could claim more progress in as short a span. . . ." Chicanos similarly have rapidly moved "from the rural Mexican cultures of the 1920s to modern urban America. . . a very long journey in human terms." Sowell seldom mentions the melting pot, but that's essentially what we have here: the old melting pot, by now a rather dull dish. If it's the human drama of ethnicity you want, try Morrison and Zabusky's American Mosaic (1980). If it's provocative analysis 180 degrees opposed to Sowell's self-congratulatory and depoliticized treatment, try Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic Myth (p. 276). The account here borders on being yet another apologia for benign neglect.
Pub Date: July 10, 1981
ISBN: 0465020755
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1981
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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