More of a well-informed handbook of effective resistance than a call to arms.
A brief survey from the front lines of resistance by an author whose experience gives her a variety of perspectives.
Now a distinguished academic, Berry (American Social Thought/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy, 2016, etc.) began her activism as a college protestor during the Vietnam War and a journalist covering it for her university newspaper. She was fired by President Ronald Reagan from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and later named by President Bill Clinton to chair it. Though she writes like a historian studying political resistance, Berry benefits from her experience both inside and outside the government, working through different channels and with grass-roots movements as well. What she offers here is less a polemical broadside than a measured, matter-of-fact account of how resistance has pushed social movements forward and aided progress in movements including civil rights, war protest, pro–abortion rights, disabilities, gay rights, and so many others, despite consistent Republican efforts to “turn back the clock.” The author discusses Franklin Roosevelt’s support for segregation and how a planned March on Washington found organizers warned by Eleanor “that following through with the demonstration could precipitate a reactionary rollback of unspecified civil rights gains that she attributed to her husband’s administration.” That experience paid belated dividends with the civil rights marches of the 1960s. Berry goes light on demonizing Richard Nixon, whom she praises for establishing relations with China as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. She also argues that Clinton pretty much got a free pass from the left: “he had the advantages of personality and his party identification, and after the Reagan and Bush years, progressives and liberals were tolerant and glad to have a ‘friendly’ president in office.” A short coda on the many challenges of the Trump era restates what she plainly sees as the obvious: “None of these battles is over….Much resistance work still needs to be done.”
More of a well-informed handbook of effective resistance than a call to arms.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0546-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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