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THE MARK INSIDE

Name: THE MARK INSIDE
Author: Amy Reading
ISBN: 978-0-307-27248-5

A PERFECT SWINDLE, A CUNNING REVENGE, AND A SMALL HISTORY OF THE BIG CON

by Amy Reading ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2012

A worthwhile read for those interested in the underbelly of American history.

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A look at the art of the con, based on the story of a man who fought back against the con artists who swindled him.

In 1919, J. Frank Norfleet, a 50-something Texas rancher, lost his wealth to a band of professional con men. Rather than swallow his losses or wait for the police to investigate, Norfleet decided to travel the United States wherever necessary to track down his swindlers and exact some sort of non-physical retribution. In a sometimes-dissonant mix of pop-culture and scholarly writing, Reading alternates among the Norfleet saga; the unreliability of memoirs, since she depends so heavily on Norfleet's own published accounts; and the larger context of how scammers have operated throughout American history. Despite the uneven narrative, the book is fascinating because Norfleet's quest seems both quixotic and inspiring. The prologue of the book is a con in itself, which Reading admits in the back matter. Otherwise, she writes, the book is entirely nonfiction, with every line of dialogue and atmospheric detail grounded in what she hopes is a reliable published source. Reading's doctoral dissertation focused on strategies of deception in American autobiographies, providing her with insights into how a researcher might separate truth from lie, strict accuracy from exaggeration. Norfleet is not the only notorious character from the period that Reading vividly portrays. Several of the men participating in the con were well known at the time, as were some of the law-enforcement officers who eventually helped Norfleet attain a modicum of justice.

A worthwhile read for those interested in the underbelly of American history.

Pub Date: March 7, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-27248-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.