A furious attack on the extremes of political correctness.
The destruction of our history is well along, says this scholarly polemic.
Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Britain, and author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, points out that nowadays paintings created in the 18th or 19th century have a good chance of being linked to colonialism or the slave trade. America’s Founding Fathers knew that our Constitution would fail to pass if it forbade slavery, so they allowed it. No longer seen as an unedifying if essential political compromise in an otherwise iconic document, the author says, in the eyes of activists this converts the Constitution to a foul monument to racism. America’s National Archives has attached a cautionary note to the original Declaration of Independence warning that the views expressed were “outdated, biased, offensive” because its author, Thomas Jefferson, included unflattering remarks on Native Americans. Furedi expresses outrage at this “grievance archeology” that he says is obsessed with uncovering historical injustices, atoning for them, and repackaging them according to the values of present-day identity politics. Emphasizing British activism, he turns up a small industry devoted to portraying Shakespeare as an advocate of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and Churchill, an ardent imperialist, as a war criminal. Less familiar with the United States, Furedi maintains that our “attack” on history flourishes in the arts, academia, and universities but only hints that it has never caught on with the general public and is now in retreat as powerful institutions such as the Supreme Court and state legislatures go after diversity and remove “indoctrination” from school classrooms.
A furious attack on the extremes of political correctness.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781509561254
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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