Adds urgency to the continued discussion of sexual and racial inequality in America.
The right wing got its chance with David Brock's The Real Anita Hill. Now come Hill and ten intellectual allies to consider the legacy of her celebrated case.
This book, growing from a conference at Georgetown Law Center in October 1992, analyzes volatile events of the previous year, when Clarence Thomas was nominated and ultimately appointed to the Supreme Court. Those events are discussed here in an effort to foster what Hill calls "honest conversation about race and gender.'' How much help this book will be in opening such a conversation is debatable. But the most useful essay by far comes from legal scholar Charles J. Ogletree Jr., one of Hill's advisors during the Thomas hearings, who uses the occasion to discuss the procedures that govern adversarial hearings, in which witnesses are effectively put on trial and made the object of political speechifying without being given the opportunity to present their charges through examination and cross-examination by legal counsel. Jordan, Hill's coeditor, notes rightly that "the subject of black male sexual imposition on black women is not discussed in uniracial company any more often than it is discussed in interracial company''; and A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. rejoins that the senators refused to acknowledge the history of the domination and denigration of black women by men both black and white. These and other contributors offer clear, well-reasoned arguments advancing the admirable goal of gender as well as racial equality. Their work is marred, unfortunately, by the volume's sloganeering (the language of "hegemony,'' etc.) and by its adulatory tone, which may strike some readers as unseemly given that the book's senior editor is also its subject.
Adds urgency to the continued discussion of sexual and racial inequality in America.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508774-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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 Yorkerstaff 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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