by Andrew Jamison & Ron Eyerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1994
Useful attempt to identify the writers and activists of the 1940's and 50's who most influenced progressive thought in the 60's. Seeds resurrects the contributions of 15 people, many now forgotten, whose work underlay the radical activism of the 60's (see Farber above). The 60's can't be explained without a look at the influence of such partisan figures, the authors (Lund University, Sweden; Social Movements, 1991, etc.) insist. They're right: Seeds is a useful corrective to the notion that 60's activism arose in a vacuum (the vacuum the 40's and 50's are often assumed to have been). The authors' choice of figures is salutary. They include ``insider-activist'' ecologist Fairfield Osborne, who reinvented the zoo as a site of environmental education; Lewis Mumford, whose writings on literature, technology, and the urban environment opened crucial lines of theoretical inquiry; Leo Szilard, who conceived the atom bomb and then fought against those who controlled it; and Mary McCarthy, whose frank and satirical writing about women's lives developed the kind of consciousness that led to the women's liberation movement. The book also includes a number of figures too-long neglected—cultural theorist C. Wright Mills, Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, activist ecologist Rachel Carson, community organizer Saul Alinsky, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Inevitably, these activists had their own antecedents. Discussion of such forerunners (Dewey and Emerson among them) helps underscore the existence of a long progressive tradition in American thought. The book's chief drawback lies in its formal structure—introductory material tends to dryness; chapters are closed by repetitive summations; material on the figures themselves tends to get squeezed out (the section on Martin Luther King, for example, is woefully short). The authors might have done better to weave their own observations into writing about the figures, making this collective biography more truly collective. Still, Seeds of the Sixties serves a crucial purpose; hopefully it will lead readers to further investigate the work of the important and interesting figures it examines.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08516-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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