A nuanced history of the giant mote in the eye of the great thinker and revolutionary.
A closely argued study of Thomas Jefferson’s complex relationship to the institution of slavery.
Even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, write historians Dierksheide and Guyatt, “many Americans had a more expansive sense of ‘all men are created equal’ than the phrase’s author.” By their account, Jefferson was neither for or against slavery as such but instead an advocate of “antislavery exclusion,” the view that Blacks and whites could not coexist, especially after the injuries wrought by enslavement, and that manumitted people had to be deported—perhaps to a Black Caribbean cordoned off from the U.S., perhaps to Africa. Jefferson, like many slaveholders in the colonies and early Republic, had an understandable fear of slave revolts, among them those abetted by the British crown. His view that emancipating enslaved people would pose a danger to white Americans is less understandable, though it gave rise to the wolf metaphor of the title: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Toward the end of his life, the authors note, Jefferson even rationalized “diffusion” of enslaved people throughout the new territories to the west, limiting concentrated populations of Blacks in the hope of averting uprisings. (Congress settled instead on a division of new territories into free and slaveholding entities.) Ironically, while he advocated liberty for all in theory and argued against new importations from Africa, he also worked hard to preserve his own ownership of enslaved people while still advancing his program of “emancipation paired with racial removal.” Of course, there was no end to the hypocrisy of the situation: As the authors also observe, Jefferson petitioned the Virginia legislature for the right of his mixed-race sons to remain in their home state following his death rather than suffering deportment.
A nuanced history of the giant mote in the eye of the great thinker and revolutionary.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780674278325
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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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