A powerful, poignant, reflection on the past and future of Black archives.
A preeminent archivist blends memoir, archival theory, and Black history in this nonfiction book.
“Archives are an unfulfilled promise,” Berry writes, adding that despite their centrality to understanding our past, they’re rife with “silences, gaps, [and] missing records.” This is nowhere more apparent than in the way leading archival institutions have treated African Americans “as footnotes and ledger entries in the documents of those with more money and time.” In this genre-defying work, Berry blends her own story as a Black woman and archivist with a larger commentary on archival theory and Black history. Born in the Missouri Ozarks to a Black father and Jewish mother, the author grew up in a region whose historical identification was defined by its whiteness (more than 40,000 African Americans fled the region in response to Jim Crow violence). While the area’s notable historians and archival repositories erased the history of Black communities, businesses, and culture, Berry’s father—who never graduated high school—ran a local museum that preserved this marginalized history. This history is retold in the book through powerful visual archive of photographs and scans of documents that defy standard archival categorization (such as a poem scrawled on an envelope). In addition to retelling her experiences in the Ozarks, Berry also centers her career as a Black archivist in a field dominated by white librarians and historians. “Black archivists are conspicuously absent from conversations about Black archives,” she emphasizes. These vignettes from her personal experiences center the ways “those who should be our allies,” including academic historians who write on Black history, sideline and demean the efforts and perspectives of Black archivists as if being the user of archival material as a scholar is more important than the role of the archivist in compiling, organizing, preserving, and acquiring the material. A digital curator, Berry is among the leading archivists of the 21st century. What makes this book special is not only her deeply personal connection to Black archives, but her learned discussion of how archival theory intersects with Black history.
A powerful, poignant, reflection on the past and future of Black archives.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798218831486
Page Count: 89
Publisher: We Here Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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