by Jonathan Daniel Wells ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2020
A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.
A tale of money and enslavement on the streets of New York.
In the early 19th century, writes historian Wells, New York was the Northern city most closely aligned with the slave states and the institution of slavery, “due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South.” Where many Northerners refused to follow the demands of the Fugitive Slave Act, it was big business for a group that abolitionist David Ruggles called the New York Kidnapping Club, “a powerful and far-reaching collection of police officers, political authorities, judges, lawyers, and slave traders who terrorized the city’s black residents throughout the early nineteenth century.” Members of the club thought nothing of dispatching freeborn Black New Yorkers to the South to be impressed into slavery. Black children in particular often disappeared from the streets only to turn up on plantations in the South—and later in Cuba and other international slave markets. The work of the kidnappers was made easier by a corrupt police department—and at one point two corrupt and competing police forces—and the fact that both sides of Manhattan were lined with wharves filled with ships that came and went. The author populates his pages with characters who are little known to history, such as the city’s recorder, Richard Riker, who “for nearly thirty years on behalf of southern slaveholding claimants sent untold numbers of people into bondage.” Small wonder that when he died, the newspapers of Charleston and New Orleans published obituaries. Ruggles should also be better known. The narrative suffers from a certain sluggishness and needless rhetorical flourishes—“As the train gained momentum on its tracks, Ruggles took his seat, hopeful that the momentum to end slavery was finally gaining steam among the hectic citizens of the northeast”—but it’s a story that deserves to be told.
A convincing demonstration of the close links between capitalism and the unconscionable trade in human beings.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56858-752-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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by Kamala Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2025
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
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New York Times Bestseller
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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by Kamala Harris ; illustrated by Mechal Renee Roe
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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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National Book Award Finalist
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
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