An imperfect but worthy perspective on a critical period of American history.
An earnest account of abolitionism’s forgotten “poster child.”
In 1855, when she was only 7 years old, Mary Mildred Williams experienced two life-altering events: Her family was freed from slavery, and her photograph was taken for the abolitionist cause. The resulting daguerreotype, circulated widely by white anti-slavery leaders, depicted a light-skinned child whose features were deemed “indisputab[ly] white” by the press. Billed as a “white slave,” Williams was eagerly exhibited by Charles Sumner, an abolitionist senator, to sold-out audiences, making her a living prop on the main stage of the anti-slavery movement. Rhetoric used by such leaders succeeded in igniting white American sympathy, a “selective solidarity” that was otherwise uninspired by dark-skinned black people’s well-documented traumas. In a spirited narrative, photographer Morgan-Owens (Dean of Studies/Bard Early Coll. New Orleans) highlights Williams’ trajectory into the spotlight. Along the way, the author confronts a range of often unspoken realities, including the anti-black sentiments that permeated the white abolitionist community, the rampant sexual enslavement that black women endured, and the subsequent dynamic of colorism employed in so-called progressive white America. Though the author occasionally struggles to convey the complex web of Williams’ life and historical context, her passionate investigation notably uplifts Williams’ true surname, rebuking the historical record for identifying Williams by the family name of her slave father’s owner. Morgan-Owens ambitiously attempts “to name, and correct” the “myopic failures of white sympathy” that she documents in her book, succeeding mainly in the former. Self-aware as she strives to be, white gaze is conspicuous, from the author’s overconfident fictionalizations of Williams’ behaviors and emotional responses to her dramatic indictment of “us,” the “future readers, who might not remember the tragedies borne.” Since people of color are not likely to forget such history, perhaps Morgan-Owens is speaking to her own. Still, the book is a valuable contribution to abolitionist history.
An imperfect but worthy perspective on a critical period of American history.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-60924-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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