An engaging account that explores Franklin and the Somersettcase.
A history book examines the life of Benjamin Franklin with an emphasis on an anti-slavery case.
A practicing surgeon, Goodrich is passionate about history. But despite being an avid reader of history books, it was not until later in life that the author stumbled on the existence of the British anti-slavery case Somersett v. Steuart. Like most American schoolchildren, Goodrich had long been intimately familiar with the role of Boston in the origins of the Revolutionary War. While stories of “taxation without representation,” tea parties, and the Boston Massacre were well known, they did little to explain why so many Southern slave owners—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, for example—emerged alongside Bostonians as patriots. To the author, the 1772 Somersettcase became central to his understanding of the complexities of the American Revolution, as it exposed Southern fears of British abolitionism as well as inspiring a new wave of anti-slavery sentiments among patriots predisposed to the revolutionary “freedom” rhetoric. The book’s focus on Franklin, a onetime slave owner whose last public writing condemned slavery as antithetical to American values, is fitting. In concise, crisp chapters, the volume provides both an overview of Franklin’s life and his relationship to a larger network of Colonial and early republic figures. It is particularly adept at weaving Franklin’s personal story within the grand scheme of 18th-century international politics. The work’s strong point is a 50-page interlude halfway through that provides a comprehensive history of the Somersett case. (In a landmark ruling, an English court held that slaves were not chattel.) Though academic historians will note that the book does not add a new interpretive framework to understanding the Revolution or Franklin, Goodrich offers general readers an engrossing, well-written narrative history full of rich details. The volume’s use of dialogue as a means to advance the story may be ahistorical, but it is nevertheless fair to the memoirs and primary source documents the author relied on to build his narrative. The work also contains a remarkably thorough, annotated bibliography that delivers valuable commentary on primary and secondary sources related to Franklin, the Revolution, and the anti-slavery movement.
An engaging account that explores Franklin and the Somersettcase. (author bio, bibliography)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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