A book with its share of surprises about how enslaved and enslaver found ways to navigate the “curious institution.”
Historical study of the “networks of personal connection” between Black and white people in the antebellum South.
Drawing on archival data from pre–Civil War Virginia, William & Mary historian Ely charts “peculiar kinds of intimacy” that emerged in slaveholding households and communities. As Ely notes, in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, about a quarter of the South’s enslaved population lived on plantations with 50 or more forced workers—“in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian.” But more than half of enslaved people lived in households with fewer than 20 such laborers, putting them in more direct contact with their white enslavers. Examining court records, Ely limns several aspects of interracial engagement. His first case is that of an enslaved man who, defending himself from assault on the part of an overseer, wound up on the docket. The deceased man’s sister testified that her brother was habitually drunk and violent, and other testimony held that the enslaved man, known to history only as Tom, was innocent of murder. Even so, the mores of the time essentially dictated a guilty verdict, though, as Ely shows, Tom’s sentence, like about two-thirds of the sentences of Virginia’s enslaved population, was commuted—meaning he was deported out of the South to “a life of banishment and bondage somewhere in the tropics.” In other cases, Black people resisted various indignities, such as the breakup of the forbidden wedding of an enslaved couple, planned by both Black and white women, at the hands of white vigilantes “in direct retribution for the Black–white intimacy that produced the wedding.” But in yet other cases, Ely shows, relations were much more amicable, sometimes daringly so, highlighting “the complexity of a society that encompassed millions of diverse people over the decades.”
A book with its share of surprises about how enslaved and enslaver found ways to navigate the “curious institution.”Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781250381118
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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