by Jonathan M. Bryant ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 2015
A richly documented work that restores the Antelope to its central place in the long, grim history of the Atlantic slave...
The little-known story of a slave ship, the fate of its captives, and its place in American history.
In 1820, the Spanish slave ship Antelope was captured off the coast of Africa by privateers who operated in the murky world between state-sanctioned raiding and piracy. To the Antelope’s hold they added slaves captured from other ships and then, with more than 300 enslaved Africans, set sail back across the Atlantic. In this meticulous account, Bryant (History/Georgia Southern Univ.; How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1885, 2004) describes how the Antelope was seized by a Navy revenue cutter near Florida, thus setting off a series of trials that would have a profound impact on the direction of American history. Although United States law banned the slave trade, the fate of the Antelope’s captives was subject to fierce legal debate. Bryant traces the Antelope case from proceedings in Savannah to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Francis Scott Key, better known today as the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” argued to free the captives and return them to Africa. This legal odyssey lasted eight years and, all the while, the Antelope’s captives lived and labored as slaves, dying from overwork and disease in large numbers, until their case was finally resolved. Bryant’s familiarity with admiralty law and the slave trade makes him an able guide through this complex and often confusing tangle of legal and moral issues, which general readers may find difficult to parse. He writes with compassion for the African captives—most of whom were children and teenagers—and convincingly argues for the importance of the Antelope case as a flash point in the deepening conflict over slavery.
A richly documented work that restores the Antelope to its central place in the long, grim history of the Atlantic slave trade.Pub Date: July 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-675-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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