A passionate, intensely engaging portrait of the group’s initial mission, as well as the terrible personal lifelong toll the...
A new look at the injustice visited on a group of African-American high school students engaged in the battle for desegregation in the public schools.
Janken (African-American and Diaspora Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; Walter White: Mr. NAACP, 2003, etc.) revisits this painful episode in the civil rights struggle of early 1971, when the boycott by black high school students of two newly desegregated Wilmington, North Carolina, high schools turned violent and provoked a white-supremacy response and precipitous police roundup. The initial protests were led by a student “boycott committee” radicalized by the ongoing culture and politics of Black Power and frustrated by the discrimination they endured continually in their formerly all-white schools: racist taunts by other students, sidelining of black students for government and sports teams, uneven disciplinary action meted out by administration, and the need for black educators and counselors, among other grievances. The students sought help from black church leaders in town, especially the white minister of Gregory Congregational Church and the assistant he recruited for help, Ben Chavis, a young civil rights organizer, who would become the lightning rod for focusing and leading the student group’s demands. After the conflict spread from the schoolyard to the town, resulting in the burning of several white establishments and violent clashes with the homegrown vigilante Rights of White People, the boycott leaders, including Chavis, were charged in a frame-up and jailed. The story of the Wilmington Ten really begins here, as Janken follows systematically the problematic witness who perjured himself at the trial, coached by the prosecution, and the faulty jury selection process. Moreover, the alliances the group garnered from supportive civil rights groups helped ignite a national outrage about the cause and helped join the larger discussion of racial equality smoldering across the country.
A passionate, intensely engaging portrait of the group’s initial mission, as well as the terrible personal lifelong toll the struggle took.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2483-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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