A thoughtful, pragmatic manual for reform.
A useful framework for “policies that need to be as forceful in the redress of segregation as those that created it.”
Historian Richard Rothstein, whose book The Color of Law exposed how federal, state, and local laws have perpetuated segregation, teams with his daughter, community organizer and housing-policy expert Leah Rothstein, to argue forcefully that residential segregation underlies the nation’s social problems, including inequalities in health care, education, and income. Addressing readers who seek to remedy housing segregation, the authors present a tool kit for activism and advocacy, with myriad examples from communities, groups, and individuals that have confronted challenges from legal, real estate, banking, and development industries. Some obstacles to Black homeownership, they reveal, hide within long-standing laws. Homeowners in Modesto, California, for example, were shocked to discover that their property deeds contained restrictive covenant stipulations prohibiting them from selling their homes to non-White buyers. With the help of student researchers, they mounted a campaign to publicize the offensive stipulation. In Oakland, the Greenlining Institute was founded in the 1970s to encourage increased investment from banks in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In Mount Airy, Pennsylvania; Oak Park, Illinois; and Cleveland Heights, Ohio, local groups were successful in ensuring racial stability after their neighborhoods became integrated, making sure that White flight did not occur. The authors counter NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitudes that result from unfounded assumptions about the consequences of integration. Gentrification, they assert, can produce racially and economically diverse communities where there is robust community involvement. They suggest strategies for closing the wealth gap that has made homeownership unaffordable for middle-class Black Americans, especially as home prices have skyrocketed in many areas. These strategies include savings support plans, subsidized down payments, fair and responsible appraisals and assessments, modifying single-family zoning to allow large, multifamily housing developments, and instituting low-income housing tax credits. Although the authors acknowledge that not every reader will become an activist, anyone can support efforts to redress segregation.
A thoughtful, pragmatic manual for reform.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781324093244
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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