An unsparing exposé of white supremacy among Northern elites.
How a 1960s-era campaign to open beaches to the public exposed Connecticut’s deeply entrenched racism.
In 1964, inspired by John Kennedy’s call for “a citizenry guided by the maxim of self-sacrifice for the public good,” 23-year-old Ned Coll quit his job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, and started a local project that he called the Revitalization Corps. In a well-documented—and dispiriting—history of prejudice and inequality, Kahrl (History and African American Studies/Univ. of Virginia; The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, 2012) focuses on Coll’s career as a brash, indefatigable anti-poverty activist to reveal endemic bigotry in a state renowned for its liberal values. Connecticut’s shore—the state’s Gold Coast—was dotted with wealthy communities whose residents fiercely protected private use of the beaches. Physical barriers, exorbitant access fees for nonresidents, and bans on street parking near beaches were a few of the strategies deployed to keep Connecticut’s poor off the white sands. “In a state where extreme wealth and equally extreme poverty resided in close proximity,” writes the author, “beach access restrictions complemented, reinforced, and helped to naturalize the barriers dividing thriving suburbs from dying cities.” Along with education and housing reform, Coll focused much energy on beach access, filling buses with children from poor cities and transporting them to private beaches, devising a program like New York’s Fresh Air Fund to give children a chance to live with white families for a portion of the summer, and mounting repeated lawsuits. The push for beach access spawned a nationwide movement: between 1964 and 1974, Kahrl discovered, “federal and state courts decided at least twenty-six cases involving disputes over public rights on beaches” in which white communities argued vociferously for their entitlement. Despite many successes, Coll never took on the challenge of “dismantling the structures” and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality, and he became increasingly “unhinged, reckless, and counterproductive” as he lost the public’s respect.
An unsparing exposé of white supremacy among Northern elites.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-21514-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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