A confident, well-written account that delves without blinking into the depths of human depravity and emerges with an...
South Carolina journalist Johnson portrays black and white southerners uniting when racist vandals target an African-American church.
A vicious late 1984 assault on St. John Baptist Church, a small house of worship in Dixiana, South Carolina, deeply affected its loyal congregation. Ammie Murray, a white union official and coworker of a St. John’s congregant, was so outraged that she formed a committee to assist in the rebuilding, quickly winning the support of many local whites as well as the black community. The next several years were marked by sporadic rebuilding efforts, recurring attacks by local teenagers and Klan-types, threatening midnight phone calls, as well as physical assaults on Murray and her colleagues. Vandals dug up the church graveyard and violated graves, leaving evidence of satanic rituals. Local police and courts, under pressure from the community, made numerous arrests. The attack on St John’s proved only the first in what would become a wave of arson and destruction aimed at scores of rural black churches throughout the South, and because of their efforts, Murray and her cohorts ultimately gained national attention. Most touching was the determination of whites from states as far away as Texas and New York to help with the continued need for cleanup and vigilance. The author, herself involved in the rebuilding of St. John’s, writes knowledgeably of rural South Carolina and with awe and admiration of the courage of Murray and others who came together in a biracial cause. She suggests that faith, always a powerful component of Southern life, may hold the answer to any final solution of the region’s racial problems. Johnson also carefully details the actions of law enforcement authorities and civil rights attorneys who dealt with the region-wide outbreak of violence of which the St. John’s incidents proved a harbinger.
A confident, well-written account that delves without blinking into the depths of human depravity and emerges with an inspiring story.Pub Date: May 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26928-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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