More agitprop than careful analysis: precariously conceived, awkwardly argued and sloppily written.
The radical politics and intersecting careers of two African-American icons.
At the outset of World War II, only a handful of black Americans were as internationally prominent as Paul Robeson, an actor/singer of extraordinary power, and W.E.B. Du Bois, an uncommonly influential intellectual. Famed for their professional achievements and their civil-rights activism, both men held radical political beliefs that eventually diminished them as spokesmen for their race, alienated other African-American leaders and aroused the fears of the white establishment. During the Cold War, the federal government subjected both to FBI surveillance, revoked their passports, prosecuted Du Bois under the Smith Act and dragged Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rightly decrying the overheated political atmosphere that labeled both men national-security threats, a charge that seems laughable today, Balaji (House of Tinder, 2003) less persuasively condemns William H. Hastie, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and other mainstream civil-rights activists who failed to vigorously defend Robeson and Du Bois. Both men, after all, strenuously believed the Soviet Union had successfully eradicated racism and class division, thought Marxism the best hope for newly liberated African nations, turned a blind eye to the show trials and mass murders of Stalin and Mao and found more hope for their people in the pages of Das Kapital than in America’s founding documents. It never occurs to Balaji that, in their final incarnations at least, Du Bois and Robeson could well be judged historically and morally wrong in crucial ways, and that civil-rights leaders had some justification for believing they would drag the movement over a precipice. Readers may grant both men the courage of their convictions and admire their many genuine achievements without buying wholesale the political perspective so uncritically recounted and adopted here.
More agitprop than careful analysis: precariously conceived, awkwardly argued and sloppily written.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56858-355-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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