Franklin scholars and students of the revolutionary era should take a look—but overall you’d do better to turn to Gordon S....
A Founding Father previously considered blameless comes in for hard scrutiny and is found wanting for his role in the slave trade.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the wealthiest Americans of his time, probably the wealthiest of those who did not inherit their fortunes. Much of his wealth came from newspaper publishing—and much of the income within that realm came from publishing notices of slave auctions and of runaway slaves. In the 1730s, Franklin recorded in his Autobiography, he set about acquiring the habits of mind and work that would make his fortune; adds Waldstreicher (History/Notre Dame; In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, not reviewed), Franklin also acquired his first African-American slaves during that time, and for the rest of his life he would count humans among his possessions, using them to build his fortune as well. Unlike Walter Isaacson, according to whose Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003) Franklin came to see the incompatibility of slavery with revolutionary ideals, Waldstreicher depicts Franklin as more conflicted, only half-inclined to abolitionism while more than half-inclined toward the status quo. Indeed, Waldstreicher suggests, it is possible to argue that Thomas Jefferson “did more to undermine slavery during the era of the American Revolution than did Franklin”: whereas Franklin “projected the blame for slavery onto England and the West Indies,” Jefferson acknowledged that it had homegrown origins and “almost succeeded in closing the Northwest Territories to slaveholders.” This assertion, readers of Roger Kennedy’s Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause (2003) and Garry Wills’s “Negro President” (2003) will recognize, is controversial. Other readers will wonder at Waldstreicher’s worry that Franklin was hypocritical for keeping and profiting from slaves while publicly opposing slavery (though “he still kept his few strong statements about the wrongs suffered by Africans for the ears of the already converted”), as did so many of Franklin’s generation.
Franklin scholars and students of the revolutionary era should take a look—but overall you’d do better to turn to Gordon S. Wood’s Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (p. 264).Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-8090-8314-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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