by Tananarive Due & Patricia Stephens Due ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2003
Occasionally disjointed, but readers will quite likely be both charmed and educated by these dedicated, candid, brilliant...
Two generations of civil-rights insights from an activist in her 60s and her daughter, a newspaper reporter turned novelist (The Living Blood, 2001, etc.).
Eschewing the broad-brush approach of many civil-rights memoirs—high-profile marches, mass arrests, White House signings, etc.—the Dues favor a narrative technique more akin to pointillism. In 33 alternating chapters, mother and daughter explain how each became involved in behind-the-scenes organizing, as well as occasional high-profile encounters. Patricia honed her awareness of racial injustice in rural Florida, where the substandard Negro schools she attended could not stunt her inquiring mind. In high school, outraged by the principal’s lackadaisical attitude about quality education, she tried to get him removed by launching a petition drive, a tactic she had learned about from her stepfather, a civics teacher, and her mother, a voter-registration activist. By the time she entered Florida A&M University, Patricia was deeply involved in civil-rights activism, as was her equally brainy and committed sister Priscilla; together they faced jail time and beatings by police. Patricia and her husband, a civil-rights lawyer, passed this crusading spirit to their daughter, Tananarive. By the time she came of age, some civil-rights battles had been won in the courts, but she knew she would have to combat racism on an individual basis every day. The book is filled with mini-portraits of the obscure as well as the famous (Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, et al.). The authors quickly identify almost every character by race, giving credit where credit is due to blacks and whites alike—as well as parceling out blame where blame is due to blacks and whites alike. They don’t adhere to a linear chronology, which can be confusing, and the alternating chapters don’t always mesh smoothly. But the anecdotes, based on family letters, school papers, and other closely held memorabilia, are unmatched in other accounts.
Occasionally disjointed, but readers will quite likely be both charmed and educated by these dedicated, candid, brilliant women.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44733-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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by Blair Underwood with Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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