A small book, but powerful all out of proportion to its size in exposing a shameful history.
Mr. Hitler, meet Justice Holmes.
Anyone pondering the results of the recent presidential election will detect the existence of at least two Americas. So did the Nazis. As Yale Law School professor Whitman (The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era, 2016, etc.) observes, the Third Reich readily found plenty of precedents for their complex system of race-based law in American legal history, but they were also puzzled by “the strength of the liberal countercurrent in a country with so much openly and unapologetically sanctioned racism.” By Whitman’s account, the Nazis were sometimes even less heavy-handed on the legal front than the architects of Jim Crow—and, he writes, it must be remembered that racist laws spread far beyond the South. Nazi jurists even found some American laws too harsh, such as the “one-drop” rule of defining whether one were “Negro.” As his argument builds, the author capably defends the assertion that the U.S. was not just a racist power throughout much of its history, but the pre-eminent racist power in the world, one that built elaborate classification schemes in the service of denying minorities and colonized persons full civil rights. Granted that the Germans were more thorough in their application: Whitman observes that whereas Germany sought to impose state machinery on race laws in order to avoid turning legal matters over to the mob, “the United States by contrast remained faithful to lynch justice.” Whitman is careful to avoid the minefields of cause and effect: there has been only one real Hitler, after all, and only one Holocaust of the technocratic sort that he set in motion. Still, the author is clear that we should be alarmed and chastened by the fact that the Nazis found so much to emulate in American jurisprudence. “The image of America as seen through Nazi eyes in the early 1930s is not the image we cherish,” he writes, “but it is hardly unrecognizable.”
A small book, but powerful all out of proportion to its size in exposing a shameful history.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17242-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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