A necessary and urgent account for this current moment.
Black history has always been political.
Givens, a Harvard scholar and author (Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, 2021), chronicles the 100-year history of Black History Month in his latest book. Initiated by educator and historian Woodson as Negro History Week in 1926, this February celebration grew into Black History Month in 1976 with a proclamation signed by President Gerald Ford. Givens traces the path of the month from its grassroots origins to its now-indelible position in American culture. In vivid prose that’s enlivened by personal reflections, Givens examines how, beginning generations ago, teachers, librarians, writers, and archivists pieced together limited resources to preserve the Black past and offer critical counternarratives to the celebratory nature of U.S. history. The author draws on archival documents, speeches, plays, and other ephemera to demonstrate how engagement with the past was a critical part of the African American experience. Givens rightly emphasizes that those working to keep Black history alive have long been animated by a spirit of protest. “Recognizing the severe limitations of the dominant historical knowledge,” he writes, “African Americans created what the late historian Charles H. Wesley called a ‘heroic tradition’ of remembering history: They insisted on giving a black account of the past, even when their interpretations, additions, and reconstructions of the past conflicted with those of people in positions of power; even when such knowledge of the past was deemed seditious by white Americans.” As Givens notes, Black History Month is now celebrated around the world, from Latin America to Europe. He writes, “Gaining knowledge about the black past has been a contested activity for black people everywhere.” New challenges and opportunities await us. Givens writes, “In an era of unprecedented access to information through technology and widespread competition for young people’s attention, there is a continued need for tailored and immersive engagement in black memory work.” There is much history still to learn.
A necessary and urgent account for this current moment.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780063478824
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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