An important and necessarily uncomfortable work on a disturbing legacy.
A comprehensive history of an ugly, long-running chapter of American history.
As Barnes, a historian at Princeton, describes it in this essential but painful-to-read work, the grotesque practice of blackface minstrelsy in America extends from “Jim Crow’s toothy grin in fraternal halls and civic centers” to its globalization through publishing empires, to the U.S. government casting it as “an emblem of uplift and American culture to be preserved and proselytized” during the Great Depression and beyond. Her immensely readable work covers more than a hundred years of white America’s embrace of this sordid form of entertainment. Among the organizations and prominent figures are Edwin P. Christy, who in 1846, in Buffalo, N.Y., formed the Christy Minstrels—“the world’s first enduring minstrel company”—and the Jolly Corks, a group founded in 1868 that became the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks (BPOE), which transformed minstrel shows into a “fundraising juggernaut,” became “a sanctuary for white male supremacy,” and maintained an enormous political influence well into the 20th century. Popular entertainers from Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Mickey Rooney to Shirley Temple and Doris Day donned blackface. Schools and churches staged productions. The ignominious history is frighteningly long, including Japanese Americans’ forced participation in minstrel shows—when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them into camps after Pearl Harbor—and the University of Vermont’s annual Kake Walk, in which, from 1893 to 1969, participants emulated the “Cakewalk”—“competitive dancing that enslaved men and women were forced to perform with fake joviality for white enslavers’ amusement.” Barnes also highlights heroic figures who fought to end the practice, from the NAACP to activist Betty Reid Soskin to musicians who created “the soundtrack to a revolution” by replacing minstrelsy and blackface “with authentic portrayals of Black life, Black beauty, and Black dignity,” with artists such as Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone leading the way.
An important and necessarily uncomfortable work on a disturbing legacy.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781631496349
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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