For students of early American history, this is an eye-opening book about Puritans and Anglicans who disapproved of slavery...
A history of the strong beginnings of American slavery in the 17th century.
Many of us think of slavery in America as an aspect of the 19th-century Deep South, but Warren (History/Princeton Univ.) astutely shows how New Englanders were quick to join in the buying and selling of both Indian and African slaves. In fact, slavery was an intrinsic part of their economy, unifying the Atlantic world through goods and services bought with earnings off slaves and slave-made products. In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties formed the basis for slave codes, banning bond-slavery with the exception of “lawful captives taken in just wars.” The Massachusetts Bay Colony and other entities exported Indians taken in local wars and imported Africans for whom wars were waged abroad. Indians were unsatisfactory slaves as they were rebellious and prone to escape or suicide. Consequently, Indians were “dumped” in the West Indies in exchange for sugar, tobacco, and African slaves. While some have said New England was key to the Indies economy, which relied on the food and cattle sent along with slaves, the author points out that the colonists were dependent on the profits from property and markets in the Indies. Warren analyzes a wealth of 17th-century correspondence, journals, court records, wills, and other documents, and she has maintained original spelling and grammar in order to save the sense of that world. It certainly accomplishes that, but it may slow some readers trying to understand the context, and Warren occasionally gets bogged down in examples of legal documents, particularly in long lists of wills, revealing estates that included a few slaves. New England slavery was not the same as plantation slavery, where slaves were worked to death for a single crop. Rather, most were sold into domestic servitude, often as a single slave with no community.
For students of early American history, this is an eye-opening book about Puritans and Anglicans who disapproved of slavery but accepted it as a normal part of life and reaped its profits.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87140-672-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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