Thought-provoking and expertly told—and a most promising debut.
A superior historical and journalistic investigation, tracing the lives and legacies of freed slaves in America and Africa.
Freelance journalist Huffman, a native of Mississippi, found the tale of Prospect Hill in his backyard after inheriting a piano from the long-abandoned plantation. Prospect Hill’s founder, a South Carolina planter named Isaac Ross, died in 1836, leaving a will that stipulated that “at the time of his daughter Margaret Reed’s death, Prospect Hill would be sold and the money used to pay the way for his slaves who wanted to emigrate to Liberia, where a colony of freed slaves had been established by a group called the American Colonization Society.” Reed died in 1838, whereupon the will became the subject of a long court battle on the part of Ross’s heirs, scandalized at the thought that so much property would pass from their hands. Amazingly, the courts honored Ross’s instructions. In 1849, most of his slaves were freed, and some 200 went to Africa, accompanied by another 200 or so freed by sympathetic members of the Ross family. In Liberia, Huffman writes, “the freed slaves . . . remained cohesive despite dispersing throughout Mississippi in Africa,” and they created anew the world they had left behind—to the extent that many of them became slaveholders. The sharp social and economic division between the returned “Americos” and the native “Congo,” Huffman discovers upon traveling to Liberia, underlie the civil war that has been raging there over the last two decades. His reports from the field are full of smart observations on the history of a nation that, although closely linked to the US, has too long been ignored. “We have a commonality, despite our differences,” one Liberian tells him. “It all goes back to America, because America established this country, which is why America cannot allow everything to be in vain.” Alas, America has done little in the way of intervention—even though, Huffman writes, the failed state of Liberia has lately become fertile ground for al Qaeda operatives involved in the lucrative diamond and arms trades.
Thought-provoking and expertly told—and a most promising debut.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-592-40044-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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