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SWEET TASTE OF LIBERTY

Name: SWEET TASTE OF LIBERTY
Author: W. Caleb McDaniel
ISBN: 978-0-19-084699-2

A TRUE STORY OF SLAVERY AND RESTITUTION IN AMERICA

by W. Caleb McDaniel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2019

A superb work of historical detection, admirably well written and full of surprises.

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A professor of history pulls back the curtain on a hidden episode in the annals of American slavery. Henrietta Wood, writes McDaniel in this excellent history, was born into servitude thanks to a Kentucky law that decreed a child of an enslaved mother, no matter who the father or the hue of their skin, to be also a slave. She was sold, sent to New Orleans, and then brought to Cincinnati, where her owner freed her. Five years later, she was hoodwinked by a supposedly sympathetic white woman, driven across the river into the slave state where she was born, and sold into “a decade of reenslavement in the Deep South.” Even as she was sent to the cotton fields, friends in Cincinnati undertook to free her, and the ensuing lawsuits lasted decades; as the author writes, “the news spread quickly across abolitionist networks,” reported by none other than Frederick Douglass. Eventually, Wood sued sometime owner and middleman Zeb Ward, a loathsome fellow who made his fortune by leasing prisoners and working them to death. Ward bragged even after losing the suit that he was “the last man to pay for a negro slave in this country,” as a reporter at the trial noted. Wood won a settlement of $2,500, which enabled her son to buy a home in Chicago and attend law school, after which he worked for decades as a trial lawyer. As for Ward, he “was reborn in the national press as a harmless, walking stereotype: that of the genial Kentucky colonel who liked to sip mint juleps and talk about horses.” Wood’s victory was significant, writes McDaniel. The payout was small considering the grave injustices she had suffered, but it remains “the largest known sum ever awarded by a US court in restitution for slavery.” The author writes nimbly of past events while giving a clear view of present concerns—including whether restitution is a possibility today, more than 150 years after emancipation. A superb work of historical detection, admirably well written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-19-084699-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2020

Categories:

HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

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Awards & Accolades

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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

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National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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Awards & Accolades

Likes

799

Our Verdict

GET IT

Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.