A meticulously researched history.
Cruelty, oppression, and fortune hunting.
British historian and journalist Kaufmann offers a fresh perspective on Britain’s involvement in slavery through the lives of nine 18th-century women who accrued large fortunes in the empire’s Caribbean colonies and, by virtue of their wealth, became sought-after wives by men of all classes. These heiresses owned, managed, or had financial interests in plantations that depended on slave labor, which the women were well aware of and condoned. All, Kaufmann asserts, willfully disregarded the suffering their fortunes depended on. Drawing on family papers, letters, diaries, and portraits, Kaufmann offers richly detailed biographies of the women, along with many of the men and women whom they enslaved. She depicts the back-breaking labor required of plantation workers, their degrading living conditions, and the abuse they suffered at the hands of owners, overseers, lawyers, and governors. She depicts, as well, those who rebelled: Betsy Newton, for example, one of 400 enslaved people on a sugar plantation in Barbados, who traveled to London to petition for freedom for herself and her children. The heiresses profiled, Kaufmann reveals, are only a small number of at least 150 other women whose marriages brought wealth to Britain. And plantation owners were only part of the nation’s profiteering from slavery: Britons “invested in slaving voyages, either through direct ownership or by becoming shareholders. Some insured the ships.” Others provided manacles and guns. Importers bought sugar, rum, coffee, and tobacco produced by enslaved workers. Kaufmann discovered that some of her own ancestors were involved in trafficking Africans; two family members were Liverpool slavers. She hopes, through this examination of Caribbean women, to raise awareness of the web of connections to slavery throughout Georgian Britain—connections that persist into the present—and to begin a process of making amends.
A meticulously researched history.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368297
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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