A fascinating history that faces still-difficult questions of injustice and responsibility.
A comprehensive exploration of a bizarre, contested murder in the plantation South on the eve of the Civil War.
Wayne (The Reshaping of Plantation Society, not reviewed) describes an incident that obliquely dramatizes the cruelties and absurdities of the “peculiar institution.” Shortly after overseer Duncan Skinner was reported missing by the slaves of Clarissa Sharpe’s plantation, a search party was organized and Skinner was found dead, apparently killed in a riding accident (or so a coroner’s jury concluded). But local planters soon discovered that all the slaves believed a different story: namely, that three male slaves had killed the overseer for his money and arranged the scene. The three killers were accorded representation in what was essentially a show trial, and were then hanged. The local planters, however, attributed the conspiracy to a non-slave–owning white carpenter, John McAllin, who was believed to have had designs on Miss Sharpe. They subsequently threatened him with retaliatory violence via a newspaper ad that urged him to leave town. McAllin in turn asserted his innocence in an equally fiery ad that put the planters in an untenable position, as it struck at the severe class differences between slaveholders and white laborers in the antebellum South. At the time, McAllin’s culpability was generally accepted. Using many obscure primary-source documents, Wayne debates this thesis, pursuing alternative explanations that centered upon the need of pro-slavery whites to manipulate perceptions of their African chattel as alternately childlike and brutal, and maintain their authority over the restive group of impoverished whites represented by McAllin. He astutely concludes that Southern whites “held to contradictory interpretations of black character and drew on them as circumstances and their own psychological needs dictated.”
A fascinating history that faces still-difficult questions of injustice and responsibility.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514004-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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