Even when his rhetoric is trite, however, Mosley is always engaged and engaging.
An eloquent if clichéd essay on black and white Americans’ slavery to the economy.
Mosley has evolved from the chronicler of detective Easy Rawlins to a short story writer (Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997) and a significant African-American thinker (Black Genius, 1999). His thesis in this manifesto is not Marxist, but it borrows a figure from Marx: All members of our corporate-consumer society are linked by chains. Blacks may tend to be at the back of that chain gang, but the slavery and racism they endured is a metaphor for the chains that “restrain us all.” The man in the suit keeps us all down. Hence Mosley declines to celebrate technical progress at the millennium, noting by contrast how little progress the civil rights movement made from the era of the steamship to our first manned space launches. Instead of celebrating the millennium, Mosley urges readers to “mourn the passage of that thousand years,” focusing on the genocide and starving children that are still here. Instead of technology, the “torch” of black history will lead us out of the darkness, and the “chemotherapy” of harsh truth will set us free. The remaining three points to Mosley’s five-part program include self-realization, breaking the idol of profit margin, and radically redrawing a new Presidential platform. Throughout, the best ideas read like a list of Progressivism’s Greatest Hits. Man seems free, but is everywhere in chains; the railroad rides upon us; we must take a break from consumption, the distractions of the mass media, and empowering our employers. Observations about the “plantation without chains” and notes on why the caged bird sings would have been more effective 40 years ago. No bombast is likely to convince readers that a welfare state like Sweden is superior to the US, or that curing AIDS is morally equivalent to curing cancer.
Even when his rhetoric is trite, however, Mosley is always engaged and engaging.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-43069-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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 Yorkerstaff 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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