by Michael F. Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2016
A well-researched, well-documented, and highly readable account.
A history of the Hamitic hypothesis, from its origins in the story of Noah’s disgraced son Ham in the book of Genesis to its presence in the Rwandan genocide of recent decades.
Robinson (History/Univ. of Hartford; The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, 2006) explains that the Hamitic hypothesis argues that fair-skinned descendants of Ham long ago invaded Africa, sometimes driving out the black-skinned tribes already there and sometimes ruling over them. While the Bible provided the impetus for the idea, the author shows how the theory evolved over time and how explorers and scientists sought to confirm it. He ranges far and wide in his analysis, recounting Henry Stanley’s sighting of a “white race” in East Africa and the supporting evidence of the linguistic studies of William Jones and the skull studies of Johann Blumenbach. Even architecture played a role, with the discovery of Great Zimbabwe, a huge stone structure that at first Europeans did not believe could have been built by Bantus. Robinson details the shifts in thinking about race over the centuries; the assumptions of Caucasian superiority that fostered colonization, produced literature such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine, influenced the ideas of Carl Jung, and led to the race laws of Nazi Germany; the scientific evidence and moral outrage that cast the Hamitic hypothesis into disrepute; and the persistence of the Hamitic idea in Africa that made it possible for Hutus and Tutsis to see themselves as racially different during the genocide of 1994. While no longer accepted by scientists, the theory still has adherents among fringe groups as a way of justifying their racist beliefs. To show that the idea lives on, Robinson cites the controversy stirred up by the discovery of a 9,500-year-old seemingly Caucasian skeleton, the Kennewick Man, on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington in 1996, a finding that stirred up the race invasion theories of old.
A well-researched, well-documented, and highly readable account.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-997848-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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