A fine account of a little-known milestone in the battle for civil rights.
In July 1944, hundreds of seaman, mostly black, died in an explosion while loading ammunition aboard ships at Port Chicago, in northern California, while mostly white American troops battled on Saipan across the Pacific.
Using diaries, memoirs, transcripts and interviews, Campbell (The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea—The Forgotten War of the South Pacific, 2007, etc.) jumps back and forth between both stories. Saipan does not lack competent histories, but Campbell’s description of the explosion revives a little-known landmark in race relations. He reminds readers that, after Pearl Harbor, black Americans yearned to fight and demanded equality in the rigidly segregated military. Franklin Roosevelt had no objection but refused to oppose his entire cabinet, and readers will squirm as otherwise admirable figures (Marshall, Stimson, Knox, Eisenhower) deliver unctuous homilies on black inferiority. As always, only Eleanor got it right. Yielding slightly, the Navy expanded black job categories from one (messman) to include shore-based labor. At Port Chicago they worked under white officers, most of whom knew little about handling explosives, and the Navy refused to heed warnings from the stevedore’s union. After the disaster, hundreds refused to resume work. Many reconsidered after threats from superiors; the Navy charged the remainder with mutiny, a far more serious offense than refusal to obey orders. The trial generated sympathetic headlines, but the court convicted all defendants, sentencing them to long prison terms. Both senior admirals and the Defense Department considered this overkill, and the Navy released everyone within six months. It also abolished its Jim Crow policy, two years before President Truman did the same for other services.
A fine account of a little-known milestone in the battle for civil rights.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-46121-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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