A vital piece of cultural archeology.
Hertzberg presents a revelatory collection of revolutionary flyers from the years 1963 to 1973.
The 1960s are often defined as one of the most tumultuous decades in American history, and the author makes it clear that it was a unique era when multiple movements rose up against the status quo like never before. The author—a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other organizations—categorizes them into sometimes disparate but overlapping movements, carefully examining each in turn. They include “Civil Rights and Black Power,” “Women’s Liberation,” “Gay Rights and Sexual Freedom,” “Opposition to the War in Vietnam,” and “Ecology and the Environment,” among others. What unites each of these strains of revolutionary thought is their extensive use of printed leaflets to upset the powers-that-be and spur people into action: “Leaflets, in their authenticity, directness, and spontaneity, help to reveal some of the discrete actions and activities that exemplify and characterize the multi-faceted, overlapping movements of the Sixties.” The raw power and force of these printed leaflets is stunning, such as one featuring a photo of a child with napalm burns, reading “We Are Burning Children in Vietnam.” Another flyer from the San Francisco-based “Sexual Freedom League” reads “Clothed or Nude: We Are Not Obscene.” The author is also keen on stressing how pamphlets, flyers, handbills, and the like were primary tools of communication and organizing, and often had to be hand-cranked into existence. The passion and urgency of each leaflet is palpable, and the author’s scholarly analysis of content and context does much to shed light on a bygone medium. Although these works, and what went into producing them, may strike some younger readers as archaic, this book makes the case that issues they addressed could not be more relevant today. Social-media platforms may have largely supplanted leafletting on street corners and college campuses, but the threats of war, totalitarianism, and iniquity remain.
A vital piece of cultural archeology.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781955018982
Page Count: 172
Publisher: The Publishing Circle
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
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
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.
