A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights.
A life of the great abolitionist, progressive, and anti-imperialist.
Born in 1811, Charles Sumner, writes constitutional scholar Tameez, “worked with a Black lawyer on the first case argued by an interracial legal team in American history”—significantly, a case involving a young Black girl seeking admission into a whites-only Boston school. Sumner is best remembered today for being assaulted on the Senate floor by a southern politician who beat him with a cane, another significant act inasmuch as, Tameez notes, the cane was an instrument by which masters and overseers beat the enslaved, who were forbidden to carry canes themselves. Sumner earned the wrath of the South for having pressed for not just abolition but also civil rights, coining the phrase “equality before the law,” including equality of education. During the run-up to the Civil War, Sumner urged that slavery be prohibited in any of the nation’s territories, which were administered by Congress; during the Civil War itself, he helped Abraham Lincoln draft the Emancipation Proclamation, pressing the president to abandon language allowing any secessionist states that surrendered to immediately establish state governments and rejoin Congress “with no institutions changed.” As Tameez documents, Sumner was skillful in bending public opinion, an accomplished legal mind who kept his eye on the prize. Thwarted by the failure of Reconstruction, he also courted controversy by leaving the Republican Party, of which he was a key founder, and more so by urging Blacks to leave it as well: “Never vote for any man,” he urged, “who is not true to you.” He remained provocative to the last, agitating against Ulysses S. Grant’s plan to annex the Dominican Republic and pressing for a comprehensive civil rights bill that never passed. “Liberty has been won,” he said. “The battle for Equality is still pending.”
A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781250362551
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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