A thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition.
An ambitious analysis of a singular neighborhood that in some ways serves as a microcosm for all urban neighborhoods.
“We live in neighborhoods, and neighborhoods live in us,” writes Rotella (Director, American Studies/Boston Coll.; Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, 2012, etc.). The concept “describes both a place and a quality of feeling, a physical landscape and the flows of population, resources, and thought moving through it.” The neighborhood he specifically references is Chicago’s South Shore, where he and his parents moved as it was in the midst of transitioning from a mostly white neighborhood to one that is predominantly black. It also changed from a middle-class community into one blighted by drugs, crime, and gangs, one that has seen its only supermarket close and its bank as well, with empty storefronts lining what were once bustling streets and residents doing their shopping far from where they live. Yet its proximity to Lake Michigan and convenience to downtown transportation make it attractive. Consequently, the remaining black middle class fears that it will be gentrified out of the neighborhood, just as white residents fled to the suburbs as speculators warned that their property values were dropping because of the influx of black newcomers. As in much of the country, the recession of 2008 hit the neighborhood hard, and there has been as much tension between haves and have-nots as there has been between black and white citizens. As Rotella paints it, South Shore is a community where the center cannot hold, where the middle class is disappearing, where the well-to-do and the unemployed live in close proximity, and where younger activists who want to build bridges across the class divide meet resistance from older residents who wish to erect walls. The author offers a nuanced narrative, partly personal and partly sociological, that keeps circling back to the same important truths about race, class, community, poverty, and crime.
A thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition.Pub Date: May 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-226-62403-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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