by John Strausbaugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
A narrative that smoothly and engagingly incorporates many stories of the war that have been told separately elsewhere.
A focused study of how the “biggest, wealthiest metropolis in the North” proved as much of a hindrance to the Union war effort as a help.
Strausbaugh (The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village, 2013, etc.), who has been writing about New York City for 25 years, tells a gritty tale of opportunism and chutzpah involving the financial capital of the riven United States when faced with the shutting down of its two golden commodities: cotton and slaves. Around the time of the secession of the Southern states from the Union, cotton represented “a whopping 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the port of New York.” Not only did the South rely on the New York bankers to finance the expansion of King Cotton—in 1860, the U.S. exported two-thirds of the world’s cotton—but the South, which deigned to develop the necessary mills, had to ship the cotton up the coast or across the Atlantic for manufacture. This allowed New Yorkers to take their cut. Moreover, despite the ban on slave-running since 1820, the practice continued illegally, to enormous profit; the author notes that by the 1850s “it was an open secret that New York was the North’s major slaving port.” At the outbreak of war with the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, patriotic fervor gripped the numerous penny tabloids, and the immigrant communities mobilized target companies. Yet Strausbaugh emphasizes how the struggle by poor immigrants to wrestle employment from the freed blacks led to animosity and even rioting. While this contingent would have never fought over the cause of slavery, the abolitionists and progressives were vociferous, as represented by Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. New York rebounded nicely with war profiteering, creating a whole new class of “shabby aristocracy.”
A narrative that smoothly and engagingly incorporates many stories of the war that have been told separately elsewhere.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8418-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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by Darryl Strawberry with John Strausbaugh
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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