Slenderly packed scholarship conveying provocative ideas.
Historian Roediger (American Studies and History/Kansas Univ.; How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, 2008, etc.) examines the self-emancipation of slaves during the Civil War as the galvanizing force behind the movements for women’s suffrage and labor improvement.
The author works from the premise that while President Abraham Lincoln vacillated over the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves were already emancipating themselves in a massive display of biblical “Jubilee.” Fleeing to the woods, depriving the Southern plantations of their labor, and joining and aiding Union lines all created what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “general strike of the slaves.” Roediger shows how this massive self-emancipation from below set in motion “radiating impulses toward freedom,” promoting literacy for freedmen, a pursuit of family ties and a new sense of social motion. For black women, this meant a “control over time,” in the ability to choose their own work, while the idea of women’s suffrage could finally overcome its sense of sheer impossibility. Eventually, such leaders as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott formed important bonds with abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass. Moreover, women during the Civil War did much of the work caring for the sick and wounded, keeping the households running, raising children amid chaos and doing mostly unpaid civic duty: “Women’s suffrage consciously appealed to this heroism in arguing that voting rights were owed women.” The labor movement’s drive for an eight-hour-day gained momentum, and Irish nationalism helped open new space for ethnic solidarity. In a particularly fascinating chapter, Roediger looks at how the period of Reconstruction also offered an “emancipation from whiteness.” Wounded soldiers returning from war were perceived as “disabled,” just as blacks and women had once been regarded as “unfit” for freedom. By 1869, however, the revolutionary coalitions began to break apart, Reconstruction was betrayed, and terror swept the South.
Slenderly packed scholarship conveying provocative ideas.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1781686096
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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 Yorker staff 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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