The fluid writing is enlivened by oral histories, chapter notes, and striking photos. Essential reading for all who want to...
A significant study of the hardships of raising children in antebellum slavery.
Schwartz (History/Univ. of Rhode Island) opens by surveying the previous scholarship in the field. Past studies rarely treated the issues of slave children and their psycho-social traumas—and the earliest studies even apologized for the relatively benevolent, if condescending, Southern plantation owners. Caribbean slaves had more arduous field work and were given less time off for childbearing and -raising, but Schwartz is less interested in physical conditions and pays little attention to statistical data (such as estimations of the age at which slave mothers and children were put into the fields). Her focus is inside the shacks, families, hearts, and minds of bonded parents and children. Most born slaves did have two parents, and Schwartz wants to know how much parents could counteract the prevailing slave culture. She sees that this challenge was formidable, as paternalistic owners ruled over parents in more insidious ways than the merely economic. At their very births, masters would hover at slaves’ bedsides like anxious, proud racehorse owners. The slaveholders’ meddling co-opted parental authority, denied their ability to provide necessities, and subdued their attempts to provide alternative cultural and social identities. Parents “hoped the arrival of children would encourage owners to recognize the authenticity of slaves’ personal relationships . . . [which] fostered the child’s loyalty to family and community.” So, despite the natural parental desire to foster independence in their children, they inhibited these feelings to dissuade owners from selling children and breaking up their families. Caught in a dilemma, most mothers opted for the survival of their families. Schwartz feels that slaveholders involved themselves in the lives of slave children, from cradle to marriage, largely to earn their loyalty and justify their horrific institution.
The fluid writing is enlivened by oral histories, chapter notes, and striking photos. Essential reading for all who want to understand the complex and long-lasting forces pulling at America’s antebellum slaves. (17 b&w photos)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-674-00162-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
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.
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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