In the end, good writing and good scholarship triumph.
A surprisingly accessible history of politics and race in Reconstruction-era South Carolina.
It is not often that regional history has much appeal to anyone beyond the scholars who write it and those who are being written about. But here is an exception, seven essays on the role black leaders played in the rebuilding of South Carolina following the Civil War. Its editors, Burke (Law/Univ. of South Carolina) and Underwood (Law/Univ. of South Carolina), offer strong proof that scholarship need not be dry and uninteresting, anymore than regional history need be marginal history. This is especially true when the subject matter is Reconstruction, which here is reexamined, less as a playground for corruption and incompetence, and more as a “glorious failure.” Why South Carolina? South Carolina had more black officials (315) than any other state during Reconstruction because it had the largest black population. Indeed, at one point in the 1870s South Carolina had six black congressmen, a figure that hasn’t been matched since. Many of these men however, died embittered, impoverished, or both. Richard Greener, for example, was the first black professor at the University of South Carolina. A diplomat and a domestic government official, he held numerous postings in a long career that included a position as the US Consul in Vladivostok, Russia. But what is best remembered about him, and what saves him from total obscurity, is the fact that he was the first black Harvard graduate. Justice Jonathan Jasper Wright, the first black to serve on a state supreme court, was forced to resign over unproved allegations he accepted a $2,500 bribe. Many of these accounts have a somewhat saccharine quality to them that could easily descend to bathos, but Underwood and Burke exercise enough restraint in their narratives to prevent that.
In the end, good writing and good scholarship triumph.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57003-357-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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