An important historical study of a topic that remains sadly relevant.
An award-winning historian investigates a shocking incident of “spontaneous vigilantism” that “was seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward.”
In his latest, Dray—the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America and other works of American history—offers a cleareyed, powerful account of the lynching of Robert Lewis, a Black man, in the railroad town of Port Jervis, New York, amid a riot on June 2, 1892. As the author shows throughout his riveting text, while the heinous crime “lacked the ritualistic staging typical of many Southern lynchings…it was grounded in the same white insecurities that characterized the practice in warmer climes.” Although only White (mainly newspaper) accounts of the lynching and aftermath remain in the record, the actual story, as the author unravels, was yet another example of a horrible mishandling of justice regarding a Black citizen. Lewis, who had worked in town as a respected laborer, was accused of sexually assaulting a local young White woman, and Dray chronicles how Lewis would suffer the consequences of the toxic stew of rumors, gossip, and deeply ingrained racism that existed in Port Jervis. After his death, the town’s citizens unfurled a host of justifications, but the author is diligent and rigorous in his depiction of the racial animosity undergirding the entire ordeal. In the second part of the book, Dray examines the shameful legal ramifications and the crusading anti-lynching work of journalist Ida B. Wells and other activists as well as the fiction of Port Jervis–born Stephen Crane, whose brother had tried to intervene in the mob that lynched Lewis. In his later work, Crane would confront an essential question: “How should a conscientious white person respond to the most egregious forms of racial prejudice?”
An important historical study of a topic that remains sadly relevant.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-19441-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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 Yorker staff 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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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