A scholarly yet accessible examination of Liberia’s tumultuous history that gleans new insight into America’s own struggles...
The 19th-century story of the pursuit by free African-Americans to found and govern the Republic of Liberia.
Independent scholar Ciment (Atlas of African-American History, 2007, etc.) recounts the rarely told tale of Liberia’s formation. Reminiscent of the Mayflower journey 200 years before, in January 1820, a small contingency of free African-Americans set sail aboard the Elizabeth in an effort to form a new nation in Africa. At the encouragement of the American Colonization Society—a group fearful of the effects of free blacks on the established order—90 or so willing participants left their old world behind to try their luck overseas. Motivated by evangelism, economics and the chance to escape the “indignities, inequities, and outright dangers free black men and women faced in a white man’s country,” the pioneers were soon disheartened to learn that luck was not with them. Faced with disease and poverty, several years passed before they found their footing. Yet even upon ratifying Liberia’s “Declaration of Rights” in 1847, it was soon apparent that the new country maintained the same shortcomings as the one they’d left behind. “In combining higher ideals with self-interest,” Ciment writes, “Liberia’s founders were not so different from the framers of the American Constitution.” Self-interest became a scourge for the fledgling nation, proving that greed, ambition, corruption, bribery and extravagance transcend oceans and color barriers. By the 20th century, Liberia further deteriorated due to its growing dependence on foreign loans, allowing for European encroachment on the once-sovereign land. In 1980, a violent coup destabilized the country further, prompting Ciment to deem Liberia “a noble experiment that had ended awfully”—and that got even worse with the terrifying reign of Charles Taylor.
A scholarly yet accessible examination of Liberia’s tumultuous history that gleans new insight into America’s own struggles with democracy.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9542-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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