Of historical interest, and an encouragement for further archival and oral historical work throughout Black America.
A descendant traces the important work of an ancestor in forging the Black community of Los Angeles.
Activist and historian Edmonds began to research the life of her great-great-grandfather, Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, in 2009, inspired by her father to “care for our archive, the value of it.” Like much else in Black history, that archive was scattered and incomplete: Edmonds hit the documentary trail at home in Los Angeles but traveled to Ghana to fill in missing pieces of the story. “I didn’t have an end plan. All I knew was that I had to go,” she writes. Jefferson, as she calls him, was less concerned with the ancestral homeland: As he wrote in 1910 in the newspaper he founded, The Liberator, “It has been fully 200 years since our ancestors left Africa, so we have lost track of whatever right or title to any property they may have held.” Instead, Jefferson maintained, African Americans were truly Americans, deserving of the full citizenship rights that had been frustrated by the failure of Reconstruction. In that light, Jefferson, born in slavery in the Deep South, counseled that Black Americans would do well to abandon the region and make, in his instance, for Los Angeles, where The Liberator would come to enjoy a subscriber base of nearly half the city’s African American population: Jefferson believed strongly that the community needed not just jobs and homes, but also “a record of their lives.” He strongly advocated for land ownership and entrepreneurship, no easy task even in California, which had Jim Crow laws of its own. Edmonds’ narrative is conversational in tone and sometimes wanders, but it makes an important point that the stories that each Black American family has gathered need “a home and an advocate,” and ideally a font for many more such books.
Of historical interest, and an encouragement for further archival and oral historical work throughout Black America.Pub Date: June 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780197579084
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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