In a culturally literate world, all Americans would know the story of Quok Walker. Egerton provides it, and much more.
This history of slavery at the end of the colonial era proves to be a story of roads not taken.
One such road, suggests Egerton (History/LeMoyne Coll.; Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries, 2002, etc.), was occasioned by the removal of the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg inland up the James River to Richmond. With that move, a large population of African-Americans shifted “into the fresher lands of the Piedmont,” establishing an economy that, perhaps ironically, helped keep them in slavery as westward movement “slowly spread unfree labor across much of the state.” Many of the coastal slaves had already freed themselves, in a fashion, by accepting the British colonial governor’s offer of freedom in exchange for service in the royal forces against the revolutionaries. Many of those men, along with women and children, left the newborn United States for Canada and, later, for England. Slavery remained a problem in Virginia precisely because so much of the population—nearly 40 percent—was in bondage, and because so much of the remaining populace agreed with a minister there who said, around 1760, “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.” Elsewhere the colonials were not so certain. In New England, for example, one of the first men to die in the revolutionary cause was an African-American man named Crispus Attucks, though less neatly than the enshrined histories would have it. (Suffice it to say that alcohol was involved.) Against the worries of Virginians, including George Washington—whose slave William Lee figures prominently in this book—the Continental Army finally enlisted African-American men, some 10,000 of whom eventually served. Egerton portrays soldiers, early civil-rights leaders and abolitionists, insurrectionists and ordinary men and women, implicating African-Americans at every point of the revolution and its counterrevolution.
In a culturally literate world, all Americans would know the story of Quok Walker. Egerton provides it, and much more.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-530669-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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