by Kathleen Belew ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2018
Belew's impressive research effectively supports her hypothesis. A good launching point for even further intensive study.
Belew (History/Univ. of Chicago) pieces together evidence from primary and secondary sources to argue that the racist, anti-government, heavily armed white power movement is not what it seems.
As the author shows, many government agencies, law enforcers, and individual citizens have fallen for the myth that the lethal domestic terrorism carried out in the name of white supremacists is the doing of angry lone wolves. On the contrary, she writes, the movement is well-organized and thus more dangerous than previously understood. Belew places these types of individuals under the umbrella of sometimes-violent white power, a group that includes neo-Nazis, radical tax resisters, self-proclaimed Klansmen, members of local militias, separatists who oppose racial integration, and believers in white theologies such as Christian Identity. Although violent white supremacists have never been absent in American history, the author pegs the contemporary movement as growing from the discontent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a war that not so incidentally trained young men filled with racial hatred how to kill efficiently, not only with rifles, but also with powerful explosives. Before the war, white supremacists believed they were supporting governmental authority via vigilante justice, meant to marginalize undesirables. But the current white power movement members would prefer to overthrow governments, even at the cost of lives taken. A key concept in understanding the overall movement, writes Belew, is the concept of “leaderless resistance,” as exemplified by Timothy McVeigh’s insistence that he acted almost entirely alone in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing despite evidence that he considered himself a soldier in a coordinated cell-style underground. The near invisibility of the movement leaders has led directly to the proliferation of the public’s belief in the phenomenon of lone wolves, which helps protect the movement from a coordinated takedown.
Belew's impressive research effectively supports her hypothesis. A good launching point for even further intensive study.Pub Date: April 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-28607-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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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