A compelling tale of two boys and their struggle to forge a path for freedom out of a slave nation.
An overlooked story of two important African Americans who impacted the slavery debate at a critical moment in American history.
Many historians focus on Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Church Terrell as the leading African American civil rights advocates of the 19th century. Yet Duane (English/Univ. of Connecticut; Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim, 2017, etc.) reminds us of two critical black leaders who influenced the national civil rights debate and symbolized the era’s frustrating potential: James McCune Smith (1813-1865) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882). Smith and Garnet met as boys at a New York school and grew to be both friends and rivals, achieving unprecedented honors in a society that viewed black Americans as inherently inferior. Smith graduated first in his class at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and he was the first African American to hold a medical degree and the first to run a pharmacy. His approach to the abolitionist movement was to collaboratively support and work within institutions expanding freedom, often relying on his medical expertise to refute assertions of black inferiority. By contrast, the fiery Garnet used a combative approach as a minister to advocate a kind of black nationalism that, at times, embraced separating black and white Americans as the only way to achieve true freedom. Garnet acquired a reputation as perhaps the most eloquent black orator of the time, outpacing even Douglass in the eyes of many. Duane departs from the traditional biographical format—surveying from childhood to adulthood—and instead weaves biographical events together through a focus on documents at the school Garnet and Smith attended as children. The result creates a provocative tie between their childhood challenges and the work they pursued as adults.
A compelling tale of two boys and their struggle to forge a path for freedom out of a slave nation.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4798-4747-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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