by Jason Sokol ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 24, 2006
A valuable complement to Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge (2006) and Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home (2001).
A well-conceived study of the changes in thought and being that swept the white South as its privileged position came under challenge in the Civil Rights era.
There is no single white southern culture, and in this debut book, historian Sokol notes that the simpleminded designation of white southerners simply as racist obscures the fact that their “racial attitudes and behavior frequently revealed a confused and conflicted people, at times divided within and against themselves.” They had much to be confused about, for many whites prided themselves on knowing what black people thought and, what is more, knowing what was best for them. They found out otherwise. The advent of WWII, racially mixed military units and integrated combat situations in which soldiers of whatever ethnic group were afraid and brave in equal measure, all helped alter the temper of the South; in particular, educated southerners began to publicly endorse the notion that vanquishing fascism abroad should be extended to vanquishing Jim Crow at home. Even so, change “was a partial and messy process” in which entrenched southerners such as Georgia restaurateur and politician Lester Maddox fought integration every step of the way, even as others accepted—some very reluctantly—the reality that the old way of life was gone forever. Sokol examines several agents of change, one of them old-fashioned peer pressure: In the case of Memphis restaurants, for instance, black protestors and the federal government faced less contempt than did “proprietors who stubbornly clung to white supremacy while others integrated.” White southerners, in other words, pushed white southerners along. But they have not yet arrived: drawing on wide-ranging interviews, Sokol shows that the process of integration and accommodation is ongoing, yet still “agonizingly slow . . . in deference to the rhythms and preferences of whites’ lives.”
A valuable complement to Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge (2006) and Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home (2001).Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26356-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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