Essential American history, deeply researched and written with verve and passion.
An ambitious, kaleidoscopic history of race and politics in Washington, D.C.
The nation’s capital was the first major majority-black city in the United States. “Chocolate City,” the affectionate name created by black locals, has long been the epicenter of America’s national political scene, but for generations, it also has been arguably the sociocultural capital of black America. In this vitally important work, Washington History editor Asch (History/Colby Coll.; The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer, 2008) and Musgrove (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) narrate a sprawling history of the intersections of race, culture, and politics in Washington. From the early 17th century through the presidency of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, race has helped to shape and define not only the area that would become the District of Columbia, but also the U.S. as a whole. The authors move chronologically, with chapters covering specific periods in the area’s history, from 1608-1790 through 1995-2010 and beyond. In each section, they show how the city “has had both a catalyzing and at times demoralizing effect on local racial struggles.” Certainly, D.C. has embodied the rhetorical freedoms on which the country was founded, but as the authors show, it also demonstrated the abject failings of those freedoms when it came to black Americans. Of course, the city is much more than just a metaphor; it is also a unique city with its own dynamic history, the political center of the country where its residents, majority black by the 1960s, reside in what the authors call the “voteless capital of democracy.” From slavery through the civil rights movement, from the Constitutional establishment of the District through the election of Obama—a moment wildly celebrated in the city’s streets even if, for black Washingtonians and others, his actual presidency was not the panacea they hoped—the city has captured myriad hypocrisies and paradoxes of race in America.
Essential American history, deeply researched and written with verve and passion.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4696-3586-6
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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