A leisurely stroll through American history in search of the elusive and constantly changing concept of freedom. Foner (History/Columbia; Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1988, etc.), a Bancroft Prize—winning historian of the Gilded Age, here examines the growth of the American ideal of personal and political freedom. The two are not necessarily the same, he notes: in our history, there has been a longstanding tension between —freedom as the power to participate in public affairs and freedom as a collection of individual rights requiring protection against governmental interference.— The generation of the American Revolution believed that freedom was largely the latter, Foner argues: this was exemplified by their estimation of “the most sacred of rights,— freedom of religion and conscience. Other generations, such as the free-labor movement of the Civil War era and the freedom-as-utilitarian-good school of thought that held sway during the New Deal years, have seen things differently. Foner is particularly good on the abolitionist movement, which held that freedom as extended by statute to American citizens had to be broadened to include those who were not citizens—namely, slaves and (in later decades) guest laborers brought from places like Mexico to fill in during wartime labor shortages. He observes, with the abolitionist Thomas Higginson, that the history of freedom is not —a narrative of linear progress— and that, particularly in the matter of civil liberties for African-Americans, one step forward is often immediately followed by two steps backward. Sometimes competing (often widely varying) notions of freedom mark our history, Foner notes: Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of liberty was not necessarily that of W.E.B. DuBois or Susan B. Anthony. But each interpretation has influenced our present ideas of democracy and responsibility, which, Foner observes, continue to spread across the world. A fine introductory text in political history, well written and thoroughly documented. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04665-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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 Yorker staff 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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