A readable and nondogmatic book that will appeal to young people especially as a way to rethink conventional history.
A transcription of a long 2007 conversation between Zinn (1922-2010) and then–PBS NewsHour national correspondent Suarez (Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation, 2013, etc.), now co-host of World Affairs.
Their conversation is free-wheeling and illuminating, though readers of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) will be familiar with his overriding emphasis on what has not been taught in U.S. history textbooks—namely, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the undercurrents of class conflict between the haves and have-nots. This work is divided into three parts that correspond roughly with the American timeline: “Change the Story,” or the gritty, shameful history of the country’s founding by genocide, slavery, and an ingrained class struggle that Zinn claims was “the backdrop to the framing of the Constitution in 1787”; “They Rebelled,” chronicling the movements of popular dissent and protest that arose especially in the 19th century (e.g., the Lowell Mill strikes, the abolition movement, and agrarian radicalism); and “They Began to Organize,” which follows movements that grew in response to inequities, such as the Bonus March of veterans; the grassroots farmers movement; the civil rights, women’s, and Indian movements; and the struggles of the LGBTQ community. Zinn is keen to underscore the asymmetry of power and economics and how the poor and powerless often turn against each other rather than their oppressors. He is constantly turning a subject over to look at it a different way, such as the causes of war and “the job of selling the war to the American people.” Throughout, Suarez proves to be a capable interviewer, asking solid, specific questions and demonstrating his handle of the many subjects discussed.
A readable and nondogmatic book that will appeal to young people especially as a way to rethink conventional history.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-517-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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