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AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN

THE LYNCHING OF BLACK AMERICA

This is history most fundamental, the kind that forces us to ponder the very nature of humanity.

The ghastly story of lynching, by the coauthor of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.

“Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fear of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?” asks Dray (African-American History/New School), who suggests the answer is no and draws on recent scholarship that sees lynching as a systematic means of maintaining white power. The text begins with an account of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, a particularly brutal case—Hose was chained to a tree, tortured, emasculated, and burned alive before a cheering crowd—which so profoundly disgusted W.E.B. Du Bois that he resolved to devote himself to the anti-lynching cause. Dray’s narrative then moves back to 1835, year of the first widely publicized lynching, and proceeds chronologically to summarize some of the darkest moments in the annals of human depravity, ending with a brief account of the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Interspersed are accounts of the heroes of the anti-lynching movement (some of whom had close encounters with lynch mobs themselves), including Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Lillian Smith, Walter White, and Thurgood Marshall. Dray does a particularly effective job relating the scandalous behavior of legislative, law-enforcement, and judiciary systems in the South and North, providing a much-needed historical and psychosocial context for the lynching phenomenon.

This is history most fundamental, the kind that forces us to ponder the very nature of humanity.

Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2002

ISBN: 0-375-50324-2

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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