A sobering, frightening account of what happens when that foul beast, racism, breaks its fragile leash. (16 pp. b&w...
A chilling re-creation of the worst instance of racial violence in US history—the 1921 destruction by rampaging whites of a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Journalist Madigan (See No Evil, not reviewed) believes the Tulsa riot deserves a more prominent place in the ugly history of racial conflict—and his diligent research and graceful writing will certainly help. He begins on June 1, 1921, with the memories of a little girl. Her mother woke her with a scream: “The white people are killing the colored folks!” And so they were. Before the day ended, the white mob burned 35 square blocks of Greenwood (virtually the entire community), murdered as many as 300 blacks (many did not escape their flaming homes), arrested hundreds more, and drove into the hills thousands of black citizens whose slow procession northward would in the 20th century become an all-too-common image. Two planes flew overhead, firing down into the black crowds. Many had fought back with every weapon at their disposal (dozens of whites died by gunshot, too), but they were outnumbered and out-gunned by whites who broke into hardware stores to steal firearms and ammunition. What had happened? Greenwood was a “model” community—a peaceful, prosperous (though entirely segregated) neighborhood whose residents for the most part worked for white employers. The author uses multiple points of view to capture the dimensions of the tragedy. It began when a young white woman, an elevator operator, falsely accused a young black man of assaulting her. Many whites resolved to lynch the man; many blacks resolved to prevent the lynching. Both groups were armed, and when they clashed outside the courthouse, the wheels of tragedy were set in motion. Madigan follows his riveting account of the violence with the sordid story of denial and cover-up that ensued.
A sobering, frightening account of what happens when that foul beast, racism, breaks its fragile leash. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27283-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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