A new light on dark times.
Where power lies.
Literary scholar Garber turns her attention to a fraught period in American history: the Red Scare, which resulted in investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of individuals accused of having Communist ties. Garber has found allusions to poets and playwrights from the past recurring in the testimony of many witnesses, including physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer; Pete Seeger, who offered to sing for the committee; Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project; Joe Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival; and actor and political activist Paul Robeson, who drew “strength and focus from his impassioned performance as Othello.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play about betrayal and lust for power, was recalled most often; references to Hamlet, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and George Herbert’s poetry also appeared. Excerpts from the hearings, chilling to read, reveal the committee members’ racist and antisemitic views, as well as their suspicion of literature as a corrupting force. When Flanagan mentioned Christopher Marlowe, one interrogator pressed her about whether “Marlowe” was a known Communist. Papp was grilled about whether Shakespeare’s plays could be understood as Communist propaganda. Even beyond the hearings, literary allusions spread into the culture: Beginning in March 1953, the television series You Are There revisited Shakespeare by showing a reenactment of the assassination of Julius Caesar; the series also aired episodes on the persecution of Galileo, the execution of Joan of Arc, the Salem witch trials, and the death of Socrates. Garber makes the broad claim that literature “will always undermine power with truth” and that it played the role of “a treacherous secret agent” during the Red Scare. She likens those years to the current state of repression, censorship, and assault on freedoms, reminding us that literary voices still have potent force.
A new light on dark times.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780300282825
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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