A twisty story that illuminates the elaborate legal system built to defend slavery and silence its discontents.
The curious case of a much-contested antebellum will that freed hundreds of enslaved people in Virginia.
A second cousin of Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph (1773-1833) was a fiery believer in states’ rights and a limited federal government. Randolph amassed a fortune—and, like Jefferson, a mountain of debt—farming on the Virginia piedmont. After he died, it was discovered that Randolph had left several versions of a will and its codicils, some of which manumitted the nearly 400 enslaved people he owned. May, a former lawyer and author of Jefferson’s Treasure, creates a kind of Bleak House narrative early on, puzzling out the terms of that apparently magnanimous act, which “became a national sensation”—and which was litigated for a dozen years as Randolph’s relatives stepped forward to claim a share of his property. Finally declared to be free by virtue of a sympathetic judge, the enslaved people faced an unsympathetic body of law, one of whose statutes declared that free Black people must leave Virginia or be subject to reenslavement. The judge traveled to Ohio, where the law “prohibited any person of African descent from settling in the state unless two Ohio landowners posted a $500 bond for the person’s support.” He found a place for the freed Virginians to settle, though Ohio vigilantes immediately drove them out and forced them to settle elsewhere. Although the narrative threatens to come to a grinding halt at times in legal minutiae, May does a good job of pointing out the contradictions of the law in both free and slave states. He also paints a vivid portrait of Randolph himself, a man who, while privately opposed to slavery, was not shy about building his fortune on the backs of enslaved people and whose liberation was less than pure. “Because manumission was just an exercise of the giver’s rights,” May writes, “it changed almost nothing.”
A twisty story that illuminates the elaborate legal system built to defend slavery and silence its discontents.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781324092216
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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