A pleasing combination of terrific research and storytelling and engaging period visuals.
How the automobile was both a machine of liberation and a potential peril for African Americans during the early decades of the 20th century—and beyond.
In addition to offering an eye-opening history of the terrible discrimination practiced routinely against African American drivers, Sorin (Director, Cooperstown Graduate Program/SUNY; co-author: Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, 2008, etc.) also discusses her own family’s years of distress driving from New Jersey to North Carolina to visit relatives in the late 1950s. In the first few decades of the 20th century, owning a car demonstrated economic success, and that was certainly the case for a growing black middle class. Moreover, driving in one’s own car meant not having to adhere to the humiliating Jim Crow laws regarding seating in public transportation. The right to move about among the states had always been considered a fundamental constitutional right—the 1920 Supreme Court case United States v. Wheeler assured the “free ingress and egress to and from any other state”—but that was “a right denied to African Americans.” While white Americans took to the road merrily, writes the author, they were “comfortable denying their black countrymen not only the right to travel freely but also the ability to use public accommodations”—and this is key in Sorin’s powerful story. When her family traveled south, they were sure to pack plenty of food and blankets for the children so that they did not have to stop at segregated restaurants and risk being denied a place to sleep. The author provides an in-depth look at the significance of Victor Green’s (literally) lifesaving The Green Book—inspired by Jewish travel guides—first published in 1936 and expanded over the decades, which became the bible for African American drivers hoping to find amenable accommodations in gas and repair services, restaurants, hotels, etc. The author also discusses how the car became a vehicle integral to the civil rights movement.
A pleasing combination of terrific research and storytelling and engaging period visuals.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-569-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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