An important addition to the literature of slavery and African-American history, complementing the now-standard work of...
Sturdy history of the Southern port city and its relationship to the “curious institution” of slavery.
As Bancroft Prize–winning historian Jones (American History/Brandeis Univ.; Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s, 2001, etc.) notes, Savannah, like most ports, was cosmopolitan compared to the interior. Its white inhabitants included Protestants, Jews and Catholics from many European nations, most recently arrived from the Old World, and almost all members of a vigorous Democratic Party, which served as “testament to the mutual if wildly unequal dependence of the planter-merchant-lawyer elite and large numbers of teamsters, dockworkers, and sawmill hands.” No matter how different, though, white Savannah was insistent in its defense of slavery. Jones opens with an account of a slave, Thomas Simms, who escaped via the port and traveled north to Boston, where his pursuers discovered him and forced his extradition, despite the protestations of abolitionist Northerners. Upon returning to Savannah, Simms received the maximum punishment allowed by law, 39 strokes with the lash, which, Simms later said, would have been more “but for the sympathy manifested for him in the North.” Drawing on a trove of documents and firsthand accounts, Jones depicts the ordinary life of both whites and blacks. When the Civil War arrived, Savannah’s secessionist fervor gave way to pragmatism, and, like those of Natchez and other Southern cities, its leaders surrendered quickly rather than let their city be attacked. The arriving Federals, Jones observes, were none too evolved in their view of the African-American populace (one colonel called them “perfectly childlike…no more responsible for their actions than so many puppies”), and Reconstruction was no more generous to most of them, replacing slavery with other forms of indenture.
An important addition to the literature of slavery and African-American history, complementing the now-standard work of Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp and other chroniclers.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4293-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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