A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of...
Lawyer and legal scholar Gordon aims to set forth the bloody history of Nat Turner’s campaign against white slave owners and evaluate it in the context of homeland terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.
In 1831, Virginian field slave Turner and a band of other slaves and freed blacks launched a bloody battle. Their rebellion was put down within 48 hours, but not before they had managed to slaughter some 55 white men, women and children. Though the book’s title suggests that its emphasis is on the trials of Turner and his followers, Gordon spends even more pages of this slim tome meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the rebellion and sorting through the hearsay of what actually happened. Carefully footnoted, the compelling story of how a literate, religious field hand came to believe he was the second coming of the Messiah, destined to raise an army to kill his oppressors, makes an interesting read. Yet Gordon’s painstaking, and sometimes repetitive, efforts better describe the insurrection’s roots than its repercussions. The author loses momentum when he reaches what should be the payoff–how the rebels’ trials were handled. After the first few days of vigilante violence to quash the revolt, Gordon argues, due process was restored–more than a third of the accused were found innocent—and tempered with mercy, as then-Virginia Gov. John Floyd commuted many of the death sentences issued by the courts to transportation, or being sold in another state. But although Gordon details the separate, unequal justice process reserved for slaves, the parallels he draws between the Nat Turner rebellion and 9/11 are underdeveloped and belated, as much of the contemporary material is relegated to a series of appendices that feel like afterthoughts.
A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of terrorists ultimately it lacks satisfying insights.Pub Date: May 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2983-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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