A lucid exposé of a shameful episode in U.S. history that reverberates today.
Searching history of the decades of anti-Japanese discrimination that preceded internment during World War II.
In 1885, the government of Meiji-era Japan allowed Japanese to emigrate. As a result, thousands of Japanese moved to places with better economic prospects: Hawaii, for one, and then California. However, they met prejudice and discrimination at every level. San Francisco’s mayor, James D. Phelan, declared that “the Japanese are not the stuff of which Americans can be made,” while a spokesman for a racist exclusion movement declared California “the chosen land of the Aryan race.” Onetime Los Angeles Times journalist Richter observes that anti-Japanese regulation was even more virulent than anti-Chinese and other anti-Asian campaigns, in part, he suggests, because of fear that Japan was growing as a Pacific power and was infiltrating the U.S. with an eye to conquest. As president, Theodore Roosevelt privately voiced such worries, but he worried more that the “infernal fools in California, and especially in San Francisco” would insult the Japanese to the point that war would ensue. Indeed, Richter suggests that this history of oppression, which included a total ban on immigration that lasted 28 years, was “one of the reasons the countries finally went to war in 1941.” Japanese immigrants already in the country were denied citizenship, though their children would be protected by birthright. Much of this owed to the Japanese being seen as economic competition, which played out in Oregon when the legislature, in 1923, “adopted a law banning the ownership or long-term leasing of land by the Japanese.” Many Japanese left for Mexico, Brazil, or other countries between 1925 and 1940, while many who stayed were imprisoned during World War II. All this, Richter pointedly notes, has echoes in President Trump’s call for an end to birthright citizenship and resurgent anti-immigrant racism.
A lucid exposé of a shameful episode in U.S. history that reverberates today.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781668031186
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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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