A concise book that shines a light on some largely forgotten history.
A series of fascinating footnotes to the story of American communism, civil rights, and Richard Wright.
Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and editor Beasley (Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South, 2014, etc.) explains that the genesis for the recounting of the interracial marriage between Herbert and Jane Newton came from an inquiry from a French scholar concerning work he was doing on Wright and the writing of Native Son, during a time when Wright was living with the Newtons. Jane was initially reluctant to revisit that period, so long after she had divorced Herbert and had become the city clerk in Santa Barbara, a conservative California enclave where the Red Scare still lingered. But once she started corresponding on her days as a communist, she found it hard to stop. She was the daughter of a well-to-do Michigan family, with a father who became head of the American Legion. She became radicalized during the Great Depression, and her relationship with and marriage to Newton, whose communist activities were perceived as a threat, were considered such a moral aberration that the only way she avoided jail was with a short commitment to a psychiatric hospital, because “a daughter of such a prominent white family would have to be insane to turn her back on such an upbringing and marry a black Communist.” The book’s perspective finds the communist plan of promoting violent revolution in the American South to be misguided at best, but Beasley celebrates Jane as an unsung hero. “On Communism, Jane had been on the wrong side of history," he writes. “But on race in America, she was decades ahead of her time.” Though by no means a thorough history, the narrative also touches on schisms in the Communist Party, differences in goals within the civil rights movement, and the unhappy success of Wright, who spent his last years in Paris, estranged from his homeland.
A concise book that shines a light on some largely forgotten history.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-89587-622-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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