A well-reported, passionate study of the triggers for failure and success within American urban education.
Broadcast journalist Stewart examines the legendary reputation for excellence of a historic, all-black Washington, D.C., high school, then documents the decline of that excellence in more recent decades.
Since both of her parents were graduates of Dunbar High School and now have successful careers, the author took an interest in the subject. Like so many other proud (and sometimes famous) Dunbar graduates, Stewart's parents felt dismay at how America's first black public high school let standards slip. But at the beginning of the 21st century, Dunbar, founded in 1870, seemed like yet another chaotic inner-city institution, with rowdy students the norm instead of the exception. Stewart is an able historian, and the saga of how blacks and influential whites managed to establish a school of the caliber of Dunbar in a viciously segregated society so soon after the Civil War is extraordinary and inspirational by any measure. The mostly chronological narrative is less lively as Stewart offers a contemporary catalog of educational horrors. So many authors before Stewart have chronicled problems similar to Dunbar's that reading might present a feeling of déjà vu for many readers. Stewart persuasively places significant blame on parents of contemporary Dunbar students for showing little or no involvement in the school activities of their children. The director of the marching band told Stewart that he had never met the parents of the participating children. The author suggests that the model of Barack Obama as a black president fails to work for teenagers who have never shown the interest or aptitude for learning subjects that will lead to a college education.
A well-reported, passionate study of the triggers for failure and success within American urban education.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-009-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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