An important study that cogently argues the case for Black reparations.
Examining the historical roots of the wealth gap between white and non-white Americans.
In the late 1960s, the Kerner Commission reported that despite apparent progress in civil rights, America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It recommended that the U.S. government assist Black Americans in building the wealth that would put them on more equal footing with whites. But as UC Irvine law professor Baradaran argues, the neoliberal policies that took shape in the following decades only served to reinforce the wealth inequality that had existed from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. She contends that neoliberalism itself explains the gap as a “natural by-product of market forces” that can be overcome through “self-help solutions or local institutions.” The reality, however, is far more pernicious, the author maintains: Analysis of American history reveals that the government actively subsidized white wealth while destroying attempts by Black people to amass their own capital. Early Reconstruction initiatives, for example, promised formerly enslaved people 40 acres of land to begin their lives only to confiscate that property and return it to Southern landowners; and during the Depression, Black-owned banks like the Binga State Bank in Illinois received no assistance when white-owned ones did. What minorities did receive was judgment from white-owned financial institutions that they were not qualified for loans because they were “entirely untutored in the business world” or possessed moral failings that made them unworthy. The result, which has only compounded over time, has been a tragic reenactment of what Martin Luther King Jr. identified as a situation where “America has given the Negro people a bad check” that perennially “come[s] back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” As well-researched as it is disturbing, this book lays bare both the injustice and racist failings of a socioeconomic system.
An important study that cogently argues the case for Black reparations.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780393881820
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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 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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