An illuminating exegesis on slavery and American popular culture alike, and a well-done expansion on Kenneth Greenberg’s...
Scholarly but accessible and nicely written study of the many roles the 19th-century insurrectionist Nat Turner has played in popular culture and memory.
Nat Turner and a band of slaves—some sources say no more than 40, others 100 or more—rose against their masters in Tidewater Virginia in August 1831. According to one contemporary witness, writes French (Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies/Univ. of Virginia), Turner convinced his followers that “there were only 80,000 whites in the country, who, being exterminated, the blacks might take possession.” This witness, a Richmond-based journalist named John Hampden Pleasants, created an influential view of Turner as charismatic, dictatorial leader of a sheeplike bunch of followers; he called him “General Nat,” imagining him to be a martinet of the barnyard, of only local interest and importance. “In establishing Turner as the mastermind,” writes French, “Pleasants limited the extent of the conspiracy to the reach of his voice”—though, in fact, Turner’s call to rebellion spread far, and long after his death. French examines numerous narratives, among them the challenging eyewitness account of one “Beck, a slave girl,” who revealed that the insurrection had been carefully planned by many participants for more than a year; the reverberations of the Turner uprising in John Brown’s abortive raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which Abraham Lincoln characterized as “an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among the slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not succeed”; and, of course, William Styron’s famed, controversial novel Confessions of Nat Turner and a subsequent film version that never saw light because, Styron claimed, “Black Power” protests killed it—later amending his claim to say that the box-office failures of Hello, Dolly! and Dr. Dolittle bled the parent studio dry, “and Nat Turner was the casualty.”
An illuminating exegesis on slavery and American popular culture alike, and a well-done expansion on Kenneth Greenberg’s collection Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (Feb. 2003).Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-10448-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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