An overheated polemic that doesn’t do justice to Martin Luther King Jr.’s complicated record.
An African American pastor faults Black leaders and activists who embrace Martin Luther King Jr.’s “tough love” but “reject his tender love.”
As the author of multiple books about Christian living and the senior pastor at Albuquerque’s Abundant Life Community Church, Washington has long been attracted to the social and spiritual vision of Martin Luther King Jr. However, when reading news stories about violence in his hometown of Chicago or when looking at Black Lives Matter protests, Washington laments that “lesser men'' today hold Black leadership positions. These leaders and “liberal-thinking religious institutions,” he says, have “hijacked” King’s dream, and only a reorientation back toward his original vision will uplift Black communities. The first in a four-volume series that critiques contemporary Black political and intellectual leadership, this book centers on examining King’s ideology itself. To Washington, King’s philosophy of nonviolence cannot be separated from his Christian faith. Though modern activists may emphasize King’s civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to oppression, this book urges readers to not forget the prominence of “forgiveness, grace, and mercy” in his treatment of White Americans. The book similarly emphasizes King’s focus on unity, arguing that contemporary protests such as kneeling during the national anthem are “destructive to the survival of America.” Borrowing heavily from right-wing critics of critical race theory, such as James Lindsey and Jerome Corsi (who make frequent appearances in its citations), the book warns against “the woke Marxist left” in public schools that is teaching White students “they are less than good people because of something they are not responsible for.” Discerning readers will grow weary of straw-men arguments that, when distilled to their essence, read like longer versions of inflammatory social media posts. And while there is ample room for debate about tactics, strategies, and objectives within conversations on social justice movements, the book’s tendency toward hyperbole, demonization, and questionable sources discredits valid points it may otherwise make about the centrality of Christianity to King’s vision of America.
An overheated polemic that doesn’t do justice to Martin Luther King Jr.’s complicated record.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4897-3602-4
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Liferich
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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