Heartfelt but disappointingly disengaged from broader social realities, except as perceived by the author's party-mates.
A notable black Republican’s jeremiad on African-American self-image.
Christie (Political Science/George Washington Univ. and Haverford Coll.; Black in the White House: Life Inside George W. Bush’s West Wing, 2006) opens with a 1991 encounter he had with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, when he was an assistant to a Republican congressman; she accused him of being “a sellout to your race... nothing but an Uncle Tom!” Meanwhile, the author was mentoring Washington, D.C., schoolchildren who viewed “White DC” as a separate world. “I vowed from that day forward,” he writes, that “I would do my best to eradicate the slur of acting white once and for all.” Christie’s argument is strongest when he explores how the notion of “Tomism” developed historically. He begins by analyzing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then looks at Reconstruction's failure, the rise of Jim Crow and responses among African-Americans to the Supreme Court's shameful “separate but equal” ruling, including the conflicting philosophies of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois. Christie seems stricken that, in contrast to Du Bois’ era, when blacks fought for voting and educational rights, now “a large segment of the black community is voluntarily ceding intellectual development without conscience.” His argument weakens when he emphasizes that “the seeds sown by affirmative action over the decades have blossomed into a culture that prides itself on victimization.” Though the author has been castigated by black peers for his Republican leanings—he was an advisor to both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—he declines to discuss any of the Republican philosophies which many would argue have done great harm to African Americans since the 1960s. Christie's core argument—with its unsettling implications about education and youth violence—is valid, at least on a cultural level. However, his primary grievance is the lonely persecution of black conservatives like himself, Clarence Thomas and J.C. Watts (both mentors to the author). Tellingly, he does not explore his claims with any actual African-American teenagers, and he clumsily assesses the Obama presidency's effects on race relations.
Heartfelt but disappointingly disengaged from broader social realities, except as perceived by the author's party-mates.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59946-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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 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
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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