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``SEEING RED''

FEDERAL CAMPAIGNS AGAINST BLACK MILITANCY, 1919-1925

This brisk book vividly conjures up the bristling radical politics of the 1920s and the fruits of a fertile combination of two political pathologies, racism and anticommunist hysteria. It should enlighten a broad audience on a period and a type of racial and political suppression less well known than those of later decades. Indeed, the development of the government's ideology and practice of espionage on black movements that Kornweibel (African American History/San Diego State Univ.) efficiently describes went on to become the basis for the surveillance and red-baiting of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s (see Gerald D. McKnight, The Last Crusade, p. 38). We are reminded, as Kornweibel outlines the emergence of the multiplicity of government intelligence organs after WW I, that Martin Luther King Jr.'s dedicated enemy at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and his notorious filing system got their start way back in 1919, at what was then the Bureau of Investigation's General Intelligence Division. Efficiently deploying his archival research, Kornweibel focuses on specific intelligence campaigns against black radical publications and organizations, including the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph's newspaper the Messenger. The case of the relatively moderate NAACP demonstrates that even though supposed communist links were the pretext for intelligence tactics against black political groups, the suspicion and suppression of them during the Red Scare ``was not limited to the genuinely radical voices.'' Especially notable is the chapter on the surveillance of Marcus Garvey for its additional twist on the situation, the work of black government informers who infiltrated black organizations. Kornweibel's matter-of-fact treatment avoids rancor, allows the charged events to speak for themselves, showing how ``the political agenda of many white Americanswhite supremacybecame the security agenda of powerful arms of the national government.''

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-253-33337-7

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Indiana Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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