An unexpected, revealing look at an enduring and complex national symbol through the lives of those who knew it best.
A historian celebrates the lives of African-Americans who made George Washington’s home—their home and workplace, as well—into an American Mecca.
How is it that the name of a woman who lived longer at Mount Vernon than Martha Washington appears nowhere on those hallowed grounds? Although Washington’s will famously freed his slaves, that act did not end slavery at Mount Vernon—not all slaves there belonged to him—nor did it extinguish a continuing African-American presence at a private home destined to become a sacred, public place. Unprepared to handle the hordes of visitors expecting to see the key to the Bastille or the great man’s tomb, a succession of family heirs also continually sold off surrounding property to hang on to the increasingly unproductive plantation. In 1858, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA), leading the first nationwide historic preservation movement, purchased the grounds to prevent any further dilapidation and to restore Washington’s home to its former glory. The combined efforts of the slaves who worked the property—whose names are preserved and honored today at Mount Vernon—and the MVLA’s subsequent, celebrated fund-raising and supervision maintained Mount Vernon for posterity. Casper (History/Univ. of Nevada, Reno; Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, 1999, etc.) supplies the details of Sarah Johnson’s life—the estate’s American flag flew at half-mast to commemorate her death in 1920—and those of her family, friends and contemporaries. He recalls their daily routines, explains how they handled a series of innovations—personal photography, steamboats, streetcars—that marked tourism through the years, demonstrates how they interpreted the shrine to generations of visitors and shows how they were misinterpreted by the crowds who visited the famous Potomac site. Casper refuses to dodge the problematic issues posed by Mount Vernon for African-Americans, addressing them squarely as he honors the service of those whom history has forgotten.
An unexpected, revealing look at an enduring and complex national symbol through the lives of those who knew it best.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-8414-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
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