Inside baseball for sociologists.
A bid to restore a brilliant black scholar to his rightful place in the history of sociology.
Morris (Sociology and African American Studies/Northwestern Univ.; The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, 1984, etc.) contends that the activist and polymath W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) started the first school of scientific sociology at Atlanta University at the turn of the last century. Due to endemic racism in the academic world at that time, the achievements of Du Bois and his followers were "erased from the sociological record," while the distinction of pioneering the field was awarded to Robert Park and the "Chicago school" of sociology, which the author considers much inferior to the work of the Atlanta scholars. Morris cites plentiful examples of jaw-dropping racism from the works of the Chicago school, much of which rested on theories of eugenics and social Darwinism; Du Bois aimed to use his objective sociology to dismantle these pseudoscientific bases of racial oppression. Morris asserts that he "offers, for the first time, a comparison between the Chicago school of sociology and Du Bois's Atlanta school, clearly showing that the latter theorized the novel view that race was a social construct and supported this position with pioneering methodologies and empirical research." The book contains a solid core of information about Du Bois' work, his clashes with Booker T. Washington and supporters of the "Tuskegee Machine," and his systematic exclusion from white-dominated scholarly networks. It is, however, frequently repetitive and sometimes lapses into terminology like "intellectual nonhegemonic school" and the cant of academic political correctness. The author accepts too readily the proposition that racism alone sufficiently explains Du Bois' exclusion from the sunny uplands of academe, without considering the effect that his subject’s increasingly radical politics and abrasive personality had on his contemporary reputation. His argument also necessarily requires frequent comparisons with the work of other sociologists, which are of little interest to general readers.
Inside baseball for sociologists.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-520-27635-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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 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
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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