A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A brisk rendering of an adventuresome life.
Daring gambits in the Wild West.
Boessenecker, a historian of the Western frontier who has written about a host of pioneer outlaws, cuts through myths and misinformation to offer a colorful, well-researched biography of Canadian-born Lillie Naomi Davy (1871-1935), who became legendary as the tough-talking, gender-defying bandit Pearl Hart. Escaping an abusive, drunken father, Lillie, age 13, and her 11-year-old sister, Katy, cut their hair, donned their brother’s clothes, and ran away from home—only to return to their violently dysfunctional family and run away time and again. In the next few years, the sisters became involved with men who turned out to be criminals and, not surprisingly, abused them. Throughout her teens, Lillie was in and out of reformatories and prisons, but she and Katy were incorrigible. In Buffalo, where a madam who called herself Pearl Hart had committed suicide, 16-year-old Katy established her own bordello, taking the name of Minnie Hart. Lillie became a prostitute, plying her trade in Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Trinidad, Colorado, “a hotbed of prostitution”; and Phoenix, Arizona, where she, too, took a new name: Pearl Hart. Boessenecker recounts in lively detail the sisters’ amorous entanglements—Lillie, at 15, got involved with a 36-year-old bigamist and later eloped with an opium-addicted piano player who, she claimed, introduced her to the habit—and their repeated arrests, as well as the crimes perpetrated by some of their many siblings. The centerpiece of the story, though, is the bold stagecoach robbery that Pearl pulled off with the help of a lover. Needing money to travel to see her mother—her “dearest, truest friend,” she said—whom she thought was dying, Pearl saw robbery as her only choice. Conviction, imprisonment, escape, and recapture ended in a five-year sentence in Yuma penitentiary. After release on early parole, the woman celebrated in newspapers and magazines as a glamorous outlaw, “uniformly noted [for] her physical attractiveness,” retreated into quiet comfort.
A brisk rendering of an adventuresome life.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-335-47139-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Conor Cruise O'Brien may or may not be ``the greatest living Irishman'' or ``the most important Irish nonfiction writer of the 20th century,'' but he has certainly found a splendid biographer in historian Akenson (History/Queen's Univ., Ontario). Born in 1917, O'Brien could seemingly do everything but math. He supported himself with prizes at university; wrote literary criticism; was on the fast track in the Irish Foreign Office until he jumped off it, carrying out too exactly the unattributable wishes of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjîld; was vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, a New York academic, an Irish Cabinet minister, editor-in-chief of The Observer, and the author of seminal books on Ireland and Edmund Burke. Along the way he became the enfant terrible of the UN, not only revealing in his To Katanga and Back how it worked but doing it in such entertaining fashion that Akenson calls it ``the first successful picaresque novel of postcolonial Africa, but...a novel that is built almost entirely of fact.'' He showed enormous courage in Ireland, denouncing the constitutionally asserted right of the South to exercise jurisdiction over Ulster as ``essentially a colonial claim'' and campaigning ceaselessly against the romanticization of violence. It would be surprising, in a life devoted to journalism and crusades of one kind or another, if O'Brien had not gone off the rails from time to time as he did in the late 1960s: His castigation of Western imperialism as ``one of the greatest and most dangerous forces in the world today'' and his statement that containing communism was one of the greatest dangers to world peace suggest his limitations. But his courage, his honesty, his restless mind, and his eloquent writing assured him of a wide audience, and his States of Ireland and The Great Melody have both been remarkably influential books, the latter, according to Akenson, ``among the great biographies of the 20th Century.'' This, too, is a very fine biography, full of wit, verve, candor, and a critical appreciation of its subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8014-3086-0
Page Count: 563
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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