A novel contribution to the literature of enslavement.
A study of how freedom of movement can be a step toward freedom.
Unless deprived of sight and hearing, enslaved African Americans could not help but learn about the events of the day: The household help would tell field hands, news would spread from farm to farm. As University of Memphis historian O’Donovan writes, that chain of information yielded a political education, one that expanded as the enslaved traveled and returned “eager to share their experiences with those who had been made to stay behind.” In some instances, these experiences might simply have been a day spent in a city carrying a mistress’s purchases. In others, Black travelers went far afield, hired out by their owners to do such things as cut wood for steamships along the Ohio and Mississippi, or accompany them to the goldfields of California. In those travels, they would have encountered many different kinds of people, both from other lands and from other regions, especially the North. “Although slaveholders were not particularly likely to engage with the bound men who slung wood at their sides,” writes O’Donovan with respect to those steamship hands, “Northerners and foreigners were under no such racially-charged compunction and regularly drew the enslaved into conversation.” The enslaved were, she later notes, “quick to use the opportunity that work brought their way,” and that work not only put the lie to the notion that Blacks lacked industry but also shifted power relations in what was already an unstable hierarchy. When sent as far afield as Cuba, enslaved African Americans came into contact with Black workers who retained strong ethnic and cultural connections to their homelands—and who were not shy about armed rebellion. In the end, O’Donovan holds, “The South’s black women and men had been laying the foundations for liberation for decades, starting long before Abraham Lincoln…and the nation he led finally came to embrace full emancipation.”
A novel contribution to the literature of enslavement.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593657041
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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