Thought-provoking and studded with piercing ironies.
A frank look at the complexities and contradictions of the civil rights movement, particularly with regard to the intertwined issues of nonviolence and self-defense.
A former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, veteran journalist Cobb (On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, 2007, etc.) studies the civil rights revolution at the grass-roots level rather than through the leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference officially adopted nonviolent resistance in the form of sit-ins, boycotts and demonstrations, yet these tactics were viewed skeptically by some activists. Violence against black resisters was so prevalent and pernicious, Cobb writes, that retaliatory violence was neither unheard of nor indeed unexpected. The peaceable sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Feb. 1, 1960, for example, contrasted markedly with a subsequent violent clash between black demonstrators and the white mob that set upon them during a sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida. Self-defense with firearms often went hand in hand with nonviolent resistance—indeed, it “ensured the survival…of the freedom struggle itself.” Cobb backs up this rather perplexing statement with a variety of historical material, pointing out that blacks in the rural South had relied on guns to protect their families against white supremacist violence since the time of Reconstruction. The author also characterizes slave insurrections as “the taproot of the modern freedom struggle” and explores the contradiction of African-Americans serving in the U.S. military while being deprived of basic civil rights. Yet while retaliatory violence might have been the norm in some communities, it could not bring the vast, radical change that nonviolence did.
Thought-provoking and studded with piercing ironies.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03310-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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