A perceptive but pedantic look at the socioeconomic and political lot of America's 19th-century working class. Drawing on research for a lecture series given at Oxford during 1991, Montgomery (History/ Yale; The Fall of the House of Labor—not reviewed; etc.) starts by discussing how democracy helped end onerous forms of personal subordination—apprenticeship, indentured servitude, slavery, etc. He goes on to show that the voting rights given white male wage earners during the early 1800's provided them with the clout to abrogate master/servant ordinances (which all but precluded quitting hateful or otherwise unwanted jobs), imprisonment for debt, and seizure of property for non- payment of rent. During Reconstruction, similarly, southern blacks achieved roughly analogous gains, albeit not without an appreciably fiercer struggle. Ironically, Montgomery points out, imperatives attendant upon expanding business activity and innovation, not the quotidian needs of US labor, largely defined replacement statutes. In addition, courts rather than elected legislators laid down the law governing employers and employees. The judiciary's authority made legal precedent of free-market doctrine and gave the state coercive police powers (which were used to the very great advantage of capital) to curb the individual as well as collective initiatives open to working people. Asserting that diversity barred domination of American life by an ideological consensus, Montgomery closes with an inquiry into the role political parties played in developing alternatives to laissez-faire's cruelly Darwinian laws. In sum, an academic's informed and densely annotated reflections on the paradox of freedom as it applied to earlier workers; offering few substantive links to 20th-century circumstances, however, the study's appeal appears limited to specialists.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-521-42057-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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