A fine study in modern—but largely forgotten—history.
A thoughtful work of true crime, recounting a “political execution” and its unanticipated results.
Warren Kimbro wasn’t the likeliest candidate for the job of shooting Alex Rackley in the head back in 1969. Write political scientist Rae (Yale School of Management) and journalist Bass, Kimbro was well known for his work as a counselor to the disaffected young and addicted of New Haven, appreciated by civic leaders and cops as well as community activists. But Kimbro took up the Black Panthers’ revolutionary cause, in part, it seems, to win the heart of a beautiful comrade. Ordered by a dimwitted operative to slay a still more simple-minded wannabe who was suspected of being a police informant—the real informant being elsewhere in the cell—Kimbro complied. It took only a short time to find and arrest him; he confessed quickly and was dispatched to a long term in prison. Meanwhile, the FBI and other federal and state agencies expanded the charges to embrace Panther leader Bobby Seale as the hub around which the conspiracy to murder Rackley turned. Brought to New Haven, lauded as a “model city” for its spending on urban renewal, to stand trial, Seale held every promise of inspiring revolution on the Yale campus and elsewhere. Enter a who’s who of ’60s figures, from a young, conservative Hillary Rodham to lapsed Republican Yale president Kingman Brewster to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—to say nothing of the nameless National Guard troops who were promised, “You will not be successfully prosecuted if you shoot someone while performing a duty for the State of Connecticut.” Kimbro testified and Seale fulminated, but New Haven did not burn. The verdict defied expectations then and remains surprising today; so did Kimbro’s fate. Bass and Rae skillfully relate these events, and a narrative interesting from the first paragraph steadily gathers storm force, as befits its era.
A fine study in modern—but largely forgotten—history.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-06902-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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