Katznelson also deepens our understanding of the modern civil rights movement, which begins in the 1930s, not the 1960s: a...
A searching study of institutional inequality, much of it wrought, then as now, by the South.
“Three-fourths of us are disenfranchised; yet no writer on democratic reform says a word about Negroes.” Thus W.E.B. DuBois, writing in 1935 at the height of the New Deal. Katznelson (Political Science/Columbia Univ.) ponders how it could be that in the declining years of Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of African-Americans could grow rather than weaken; most people in most regions had been affected in one way or another by the Depression, but in the South, where the average per capita income was half that of the rest of the country, black male workers earned a third of what even poor whites did, $565 a year against $1,535. Every other index was weighed against blacks: their health was poorer, their rate of homeownership lower, their acreage smaller and less productive. Aid programs organized by the various alphabet agencies of the New Deal did little to change the configuration, Katznelson writes, because the former slave states of the South fielded members on Capitol Hill who saw to it that relief went to white constituents. And because the Roosevelt administration was beholden to the South for votes, it did almost nothing to advance civil rights for African-Americans: “There would be no anti-lynching law on President Roosevelt’s watch,” Katznelson writes, “nor would racial hierarchies in the armed forces or federal agencies be disturbed in any basic way.” The gap would even widen following WWII, a time when other non-black minorities, such as Jews and Catholics, enjoyed “the extension of American pluralism and tolerance.” Katznelson does good service in excavating the archaeology of institutional racism, which, he notes, was brought about bit by bit, and not as a coherent program, and was thus easy to overlook.
Katznelson also deepens our understanding of the modern civil rights movement, which begins in the 1930s, not the 1960s: a thoughtful account for readers with an interest in that history.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05213-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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