A provocative look at a long shadow cast over the nation’s past and present.
A sharp history in which the author argues that the Civil War has been raging for more than a century and a half—and the Confederacy is winning.
The Civil War “ended only militarily at Appomattox,” writes Suri, the chair of leadership in global affairs at the University of Texas. It has been waged in venues other than the battlefield ever since, often with the aid of those who would have been Unionists in 1861. The battle flag in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, notes the author, came from a latter-day secessionist in Delaware, a 51-year-old White man for whom the Confederate cause “remained alive.” Moreover, it remained alive in various nonimaginary ways: voter suppression, Jim Crow segregationism, lynchings, and spasms of insurrection. In the last case, Suri reminds readers that the smoke had barely cleared from the battlefield when Whites in Memphis rebelled against Union martial law, which was enforced by Black soldiers. The Union general in charge “told investigators that the hostility of the white citizens in Memphis was simply too great and that his forces were too small to counter it,” and no insurrectionists were punished. Once the war was formally over, Whites on both sides essentially abandoned the Black population to their fate, with Reconstruction jettisoned owing to Andrew Johnson’s White supremacism and Ulysses S. Grant’s failure to press for universal civil rights. The result was a Lost Cause narrative that enabled Southerners, would-be and actual, then and now, to imagine themselves as the victims of the war. The author clearly shows that with the death of James Garfield in 1881, the victorious Union gave up on trying to “build an inclusive, multiracial democracy.” Few of Suri’s observations are groundbreaking, but his prescriptions for finishing that job are meaningful all the same, including “a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote.”
A provocative look at a long shadow cast over the nation’s past and present.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5854-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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