An engaging and challenging read.
A post-hardcore rock star, community activist, and social justice intellectual offers an alternative look at countercolonial history through the lens of the Rastafari movement.
Clearly having developed into far more than his punk-influenced history suggests, Sullivan offers a vibrant examination of American and African history with an anti-colonial patina, colored by episodes from the lives of fascinating and often controversial figures in both the past and contemporary history. Not quite a manifesto and not quite a memoir, the book incorporates aspects of both into an unusual but compelling narrative that encourages cooperation for the greater good, cultural tolerance, and equitable relationships among all peoples—a process akin to “decolonizing our minds.” The author begins with some anecdotes that will be fascinating for those of us who remember the days of Minor Threat and Bad Brains in the D.C. punk scene. Sullivan (a self-described “racially ambiguous white kid”) recounts venturing out with his friend Johnny Temple (who would go on to found Akashic Books, among numerous other exploits) to see Toots and the Maytals, accidentally meeting Doctor Dread, and landing jobs at the famous RAS Records. From there, the author spins a culturally rich, spiritually uplifting history of the world that stretches from Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, a central figure in Rastafari culture, to the abolitionist John Brown to Marilyn Buck, the violent revolutionary and poet whom Sullivan corresponded with until her death in 2010. Along the way, the author frequently returns to themes that are clearly important to him, including prison ministry and reform, the power of collectivism, the meaning of resistance, and the importance of unity among all peoples. It’s a messy story, with charged touchstones that some readers will find uncomfortable, but it comes together well, and Sullivan offers a strong argument for cooperative economics.
An engaging and challenging read.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-655-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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