A welcome contribution to sports history, drawing attention to two extraordinary athletes for whom recognition is long...
A vigorous biography of an African-American pioneer of professional cycling—a man all but forgotten today.
Washington Post investigative political reporter Kranish (Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War, 2010, etc.) switches gears here to go into the realm of sports history, albeit a history that is laden with political and racial burdens. His story centers on young racer Marshall “Major” Taylor (1878-1932), whose father had served in the Union Army during the Civil War but whose bicycle-racing debut, at Madison Square Garden, was marked by the house band scrambling to find the sheet music for “Dixie,” “known as the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy.” The “black meteor,” as one paper called Taylor, earned every one of his medals and prizes through the ordinary hard work of athletics coupled with the racism of late-19th-century America, a time when Plessy v. Ferguson was reinforcing separation, “all but normalizing racism and undoing much of what had been achieved since slavery ended with the Civil War.” Particularly intriguing in the narrative is not just Taylor, but also an entrepreneur and fellow racer who took him under his wing, a pioneer named Louis de Franklin Munger, who built and raced high-wheel bicycles, moved on to “safety bicycles” with equally sized wheels, and ended up building cars in New York City, selling to the likes of John Jacob Astor. Also of interest is the datum that Taylor predated the boxer Jack Johnson by a dozen years—and that Johnson himself, inspired by Taylor, “dreamed of being a bicycling world champion” until an accident put him in the hospital and, as he put it, made him decide to “look for a less dangerous profession.” The dangers would mount for Taylor in the age of Jim Crow, and his misfortunes in later life make for sobering reading.
A welcome contribution to sports history, drawing attention to two extraordinary athletes for whom recognition is long overdue.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9259-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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