First to appear of a projected ten volumes in The Young Oxford History of Women in the United States, covering ``the public and private lives of...women over the past four centuries.'' May, University of Minnesota professor and specialist in women's issues, traces women's status from the Depression, when many women began to share wage-earning responsibilities, through their success in tradition-shattering jobs during WW II and into the postwar reaction, when one-income families were idealized as the reward of hard-earned peace and prosperity. Contrasting women's and men's roles, May deals with education, employment, sexuality, child-rearing, domesticity, and political action as they evolved in these critical years, laying firm ground for the more turbulent changes of the 60's. Backing generalizations with ample statistics and telling incidents, she's especially careful to differentiate between white middle class and minority experiences—for example, African-Americans were more likely to complete college: in an era when white women believed that earning an ``M.R.S.'' was the path to security and fulfillment, blacks saw education as a way out of poverty. The author concludes with individuals and groups who went ``Against the Grain'' in the 40's and 50's—black civil rights activists, Women Strike for Peace members who successfully confronted the House Un-American Activities Committee, giants like Eleanor Roosevelt and Rachel Carson. Lively, fascinating, lucid, accessible, balanced—a fine resource that belongs in every library. B&w photos; chronology; lengthy bibliography; index. (Nonfiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508084-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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