Timely reading in an era of social and legislative backsliding that threatens to erase many civil rights gains.
A cogent argument for considering 1963 as the central year of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
A historian at the University of Texas affiliated with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Joseph opens his narrative with the compelling figure of a young James Baldwin, who was traveling to Mississippi to look at the voting rights initiative firsthand. Baldwin, “the leading cultural figure of the age,” had committed an act of daring in turning some of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier rhetoric toward civil rights, confronting the liberal establishment and forcing JFK and brother Bobby to pay more than lip service to the cause and move instead to “pragmatic action.” Kennedy did so, if perhaps reluctantly at first, unquestionably influenced by Baldwin’s arguments that racial segregation adversely affected not just Black people but all Americans. Baldwin was also, Joseph argues, a figure who could move between camps: cocktail parties in New York, political sessions in Washington, the poorest hamlets in the Mississippi Delta. Alongside him, as Joseph notes, emerged a constellation of like-minded activists and writers, among them Lorraine Hansberry and Medgar Evers. While many actors central to the civil rights struggle figure in Joseph’s account, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., the latter of whom “became the first Black Time magazine Man of the Year” at the end of 1963, Baldwin stands firmly at the moral center of the movement: “He loved America enough to retain a battered faith in its capacity to change.” Lyndon Johnson, too, receives his due as far less diffident than the Kennedys in pressing for civil rights reforms, although it was Kennedy’s assassination that served as stimulus for “the most consequential legislation that would be passed during America’s Second Reconstruction.”
Timely reading in an era of social and legislative backsliding that threatens to erase many civil rights gains.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781541675896
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
