by Fritz Hirschfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1997
Recently several writers (e.g., Conor Cruise O'Brien in The Long Affair) have critically examined the racial hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson, who preached equality but practiced slavery. Now fellow Virginia slaveholder George Washington receives like treatment. Hirschfeld, the editor of the John Hancock Papers, shows that in the pre-Revolutionary era Washington ran a successful plantation with slave labor and participated in the most brutal aspects of the slave system: He purchased and sold slaves, pursued runaways with vigor, and subjected wayward slaves to harsh punishments. The Revolutionary War and its Enlightenment ideology changed that: both because of concerns about his reputation and rapidly developing moral doubts about the justice of slavery. Mostly drawing on Washington's own correspondence and diaries and those of contemporaries, Hirschfeld shows how Washington's attitudes toward slavery evolved during his life. Prewar plantation records show that he assembled a large slave population, apparently without moral qualms, as his landholdings expanded, but in 1775 he reversed an earlier decision to bar African-Americans from military service. By 1779 he was expressing a distaste for the slave trade, and in 1786 he even wrote, ``I never mean . . . to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.'' He refrained from breaking up slave families, even though this practice made his plantation unprofitable, and finally in his will he freed his slaves. Hirschfeld shows that Washington's private dislike of slavery didn't lead him as president to exercise his moral leadership to end the institution. Hirschfeld speculates that Washington understandably didn't want to jeopardize the new nation's unity. Describing his final attitude as ``lukewarm abolitionism,'' the author concludes that Washington's was a mixed legacy. A thoughtful and well-documented work that does not diminish Washington's greatness, but shows the iconic Gilbert Stuart figure at his most morally vulnerable. (20 illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8262-1135-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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