Required reading for activists and for those wondering where things went wrong for America’s working people.
Affecting portrait of a decaying loop on the Rust Belt.
Science journalist Rudacille (The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights, 2005, etc.) is a native of Dundalk, Md., a town near Baltimore and, like that larger city, a place of mixed ethnicities and decidedly mixed fortunes. It is now ground zero for what President Obama noted in his campaign about the bitterness felt by blue-collar, and especially white blue-collar, America of late, a remark for which Obama was much criticized. “But he was only saying what anyone who comes from a place like Dundalk knows full well is true,” writes the author. “Over the past thirty years, its residents have watched a hard-won prosperity and security slip away.” Rudacille provides close descriptions of that hard winning, an effort born of union organizing and endless negotiation against improbable odds. Some of the champions of that effort were unabashed socialists and communists. Recalls one worker, “When I was a kid, I overheard a lot of conversations about workers’ rights…A lot of it was in Italian.” Italians and Eastern Europeans bonded with longtime Marylanders to work against the color line—not necessarily out of any strong affection for African-American workers in those days, Rudacille notes, but rather because of the difficulty of trying to organize parallel segregated unions. Some workers prospered; others became ill from lungs full of asbestos and veins full of industrial toxins; but all made a community that thrived until corporate executives, seeking a way to reduce costs while innovating, took the jobs overseas, often to plants built in the aftermath of war against our former enemies. In the end, Rudacille has delivered a book that would do Studs Terkel proud, partaking of his oral-historical approach to the past at turns, imbued with his pro-labor spirit throughout.
Required reading for activists and for those wondering where things went wrong for America’s working people.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42368-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
