By analyzing the “Letter” as both literature and moral imperative, Rieder adds to his subject’s considerable legacy.
A tight, academic focus on the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” offers a fresh perspective on Dr. King’s message.
Few lives of the 20th century have been more richly, deeply and exhaustively explored than that of Martin Luther King Jr., and this study by Rieder (Sociology/Barnard Coll.; The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2008) draws heavily from that biographical literature. What distinguishes this work is the author’s close reading of King’s letter and his explorations of its origins and aftermath. By the time of King’s jailing in Birmingham, it had been six years since he was featured on the cover of Time and generally proclaimed the leader of black America. The movement he led seemed to have stalled, and King felt besieged by criticism from both liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, that he was too much of an extremist, too moderate, that his campaign of nonviolence was pushing too hard, too fast or was accomplishing too little. “Right up to the minute of his jailing, he felt disappointed and betrayed by blacks and whites alike,” writes Rieder. Everyone from the New York Times to the Kennedy administration to local Alabama clergy was telling him that now was not the time for massive protest. Responded King in the letter, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ” The letter provided the “moral and philosophical foundations” for the movement and, in some ways, contrasts sharply with the more often invoked “I Have a Dream” speech: “On the surface, the ‘Letter’ and the ‘Dream’ could not have differed more: the rebuke to white inertia on one side, the joyous refrain of brotherhood on the other.”
By analyzing the “Letter” as both literature and moral imperative, Rieder adds to his subject’s considerable legacy.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-058-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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