A brief encapsulation of the fury and disillusionment that characterized the career of this significant American activist.
Biography of an important early-20th-century labor and human rights activist known as the East Side Joan of Arc, now sadly neglected. This is the latest in the Lives of American Women series.
A radical agitator and later devoted member of the U.S. Communist Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was notorious in her day, stretching from 1906, when she first began speaking publicly against the capitalist exploitation of the working class at age 16, until her death in the Soviet Union at age 74. Vapnek (History/St. John’s Univ.; Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920, 2009, etc.) sketches Flynn’s radical activity within the context of ongoing labor struggles and the rise and fall of sympathy for the socialist cause in the first half of the century. Indeed, Flynn had gotten arrested and imprisoned numerous times in her career. Her longest incarceration occurred during the fraught McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when she served more than two years at West Virginia’s Alderson Female Penitentiary for “conspiracy” as a CP leader. Flynn’s Irish immigrant parents fostered her early free-thinking radicalism; members of the Knights of Labor, they moved from New England to the Bronx to find work, lived among the struggling poor and were compelled by the revolutionary message of socialism. From her first public speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” Flynn gained the notice of leaders like anarchist Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World. Becoming a first-rate Wobbly “jawsmith,” Flynn traveled widely for the IWW, dropped out of high school, got married and had a child, whom she deposited with her family in the Bronx while she pursued her trailblazing work for the right of free speech and the strikers. Flynn denounced the violence that beset the struggle and did not work for women’s suffrage, although she believed fiercely in women’s equality, free love and birth control.
A brief encapsulation of the fury and disillusionment that characterized the career of this significant American activist.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8133-4809-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Westview/Perseus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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