A scholarly but accessible treatment of a significant forerunner of the civil-rights movement.
Moye (History/Univ. of North Texas) takes a sober, probing look at the complicated segregated context in which black men trained and were deployed as pilots during World War II.
Integration of the Armed Services came by President Truman’s executive decree in 1948, and then as a political re-election nudge, but it was largely due to the valiant performance and active advocacy for equal rights by the black pilots such as those trained at Tuskegee Army Flying School. Before WWII, segregation reigned in all aspects of American life, and the Army War College maintained strict racist stereotypes regarding black soldiers—they were superstitious, “susceptible to the influence crowd psychology” and “unmoral [sic],” according to the “pseudoscientific” 1925 study “The Use of Negro Manpower in War.” However, by June 1941 Roosevelt was aware of the danger of alienating blacks from an all-out war effort, recognizing the significance of their power: “Our problem is to harness and hitch it up for action on the broadest, daring and most gigantic scale.” Thanks to lobbying by presidents of historically black colleges like Wilberforce, Hampton and Tuskegee, the creation of the Civilian Pilot Training Act of 1939 allotted allowances for the training of black pilots as well as whites. The NAACP and others objected to the segregation of black pilots at Tuskegee as a creation of “a Jim Crow air squadron.” Nonetheless, nearly 1,000 pilots graduated from the program, and nearly half of them flew in combat, proving mightily to the world their capabilities. Moye follows the careers of many of these pilots, their experience of discrimination in the Army and shameful treatment afterward, and how vigorous efforts by Eleanor Roosevelt, William H. Hastie and others helped change perceptions.
A scholarly but accessible treatment of a significant forerunner of the civil-rights movement.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-538655-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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