The South rises again—if only in this study of American history. Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974) here gathers occasional essays, book reviews, and lectures of the last two decades. His subject is constant: the history of the American South, and especially its 19th-century economic and religious development. His approach is not: A longtime Marxist, Genovese has increasingly adopted a conservative stance on matters political and cultural without rejecting his leftist roots, a trajectory that he traces to a realization that far from being an opiate, religion was for Southern slaves the vehicle of ``an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation in this world as well as the next.'' Genovese fires the expected salvoes at the legions of postmodernists and deconstructionists in the academy. Proponents of received tradition will find little comfort in pronouncements like, ``William Bennett...deserves to have his knuckles bloodied for his sadly un-Burkean defense of a narrow and bigoted literary canon.'' But then, neither will enemies of that tradition, whom Genovese characterizes as ``not so much attacking courses in Western civilization as attacking Western civilization itself.'' Much of Genovese's book is given over to essays on minor Confederate commanders, conservative scholars, and other small wrinkles in the fabric of Southern history. These excursus, always well written, will be of interest to few general readers. Of far broader appeal is Genovese's examination of the theology of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A thoroughgoing case study in intellectual biography, this fine, long essay tackles, among other issues, the politically charged contention that King plagiarized much of his Harvard dissertation; Genovese's answer will surprise King's admirers and detractors alike. The constant reference to intramural academic matters naturally limits the audience, but Genovese's collection offers much of value.
Pub Date: May 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-8262-1001-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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