A compelling argument that over its history the South changed from a polyglot society into two homogeneous ones divided by race, but that in recent decades the region has been rapidly acquiring a new ethnic diversity. Tindall (History/Univ. of North Carolina; America, 1984) develops this thesis in three short pieces drawn from his 1992 Averitt lectures at Georgia Southern University. In the first, ``Natives and Newcomers,'' Tindall gives an overview of the surprisingly diverse social composition of the South from the time of the first European settlers through modern times. The pervasive presence of African-Americans and Indians, Scotch-Irish settlers, English colonists, Louisiana Cajuns, and German Protestants seeking religious freedom gave the 18th-century South, in Tindall's view, ``the most polyglot population in the English colonies.'' After the Revolution, Indians were expelled from the Southeastern states and far fewer new immigrants settled in the South than in the North. In ``Ethnic Southerners,'' Tindall traces the growth of a distinctive southern ethnicity from the colonial period to the 20th century. The regional identity of southern people, he asserts, grew both out of the ethnic traditions they brought with them and out of perceived contrasts with other regions of the country in lifestyle, custom, and outlook. In ``Southern Ethnics,'' Tindall looks at the modern phenomenon of foreign immigration to the South. He points out that, in recent decades, more people have moved into the region than have moved out: from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the northern states. Tindall anticipates that the nativism, xenophobia, and political tension that met earlier waves of immigration to the US may occur in the modern South, but that the diverse cultures of the new southern ethnics will ultimately enrich their region. Tindall eruditely shatters stereotypes about the South, drawing a picture of a region that is at once distinctive and much like the rest of the US in its diversity.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1655-5
Page Count: 79
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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