by George Hendrick & Willene Hendrick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2005
Less fluent, but also broader, than Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan (p. 94).
An overview of African-American resistance to injustice from the early days of slavery to the heyday of the civil rights movement and beyond.
The quest for civil rights has occupied African-Americans from the first generations in captivity, independent scholars Hendrick and Hendrick show. Most, the authors insist, “attempted to escape bondage without doing bodily harm to anyone,” and though violent slave rebellions exercised contemporary observers and still figure in the history textbooks, nonviolent civil disobedience was more common an instrument of resistance. African-Americans, too, were important actors in the various Northern abolition movements of the three decades preceding the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, for one, began as a follower of William Lloyd Garrison, but later broke with that movement as he came to believe that armed conflict was necessary to achieve emancipation. An early form of protest was the boycotting of goods produced by slave labor, such as cotton, sugar and tobacco; this same form of protest became a hallmark of Mohandas Gandhi’s later satyagraha movement in South Africa and India, which would come full circle when adopted in the 1950s by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Hendricks’ long detour into Gandhi’s life and work is a distraction, well-covered and well-known as these matters are, but their continued attention to the nonviolent aspect of the struggle is welcome, particularly as its practitioners remained resolute in the most trying of circumstances, such as the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activities in the early-20th century and the corresponding wave of lynchings throughout the South—3,745, the authors record, in the U.S. between 1889 and 1932. The specter of lynching closes the book, as the authors consider the 1998 murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, a town, they write, that even today seems never to have heard of desegregation.
Less fluent, but also broader, than Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan (p. 94).Pub Date: May 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-609-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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