An eye-opener to the racism that’s so deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.
An immigrant family’s struggles bring a web of intrigue leading to a cause célèbre in antebellum New Orleans, known then as America’s “Sin City.”
In his dogged dissection of one of the most ornate and convoluted legal cases ever played out in an American slave state, Bailey, who originally published this in his native Australia, does a fine job of resurrecting the ambience and cultural atmosphere of New Orleans in the 1840s. The dominant Creoles’ lifestyle in the Vieux Carré is luxuriously carefree; the poor, on the other hand, are scourged by yellow fever, harried by constant threat of floods, and preyed on by landholders, river-men, and other opportunists. And beneath even the poor are the slaves, locked into their fates by Louisiana’s elaborate system of racist legal codes administered by courts as corrupt as the municipal power structure that populated them. Into this mix, in 1843, suddenly walks a young woman immediately recognized in a German neighborhood as Salomé Müller, the long-lost daughter of fellow immigrants arriving in 1818. She responds by giving her name as Sally Miller and reporting that she is in fact the property—a slave—of the owner of a nearby cabaret. Thus begins the epic struggle of the German community to reclaim one of its own and, in the process, impugn the honor of a plantation owner who supposedly took advantage of an orphaned white girl. But, the court inquires, is she really white? Is she really who she claims to be—or a light-skinned runaway slave imposter? Bailey’s trial narrative is a virtual education on the bizarre legalisms once regularly applied to human chattel; when, for instance, freedom eventually comes to Sally—or whoever she was—it is denied her children.
An eye-opener to the racism that’s so deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-921-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
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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