by Charles M. Payne ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1995
With this history of the civil rights movement focusing on the Everyman turned hero, the commoner as crusader for justice, Payne challenges the old idea that history is the biography of great men. That definition of history has been nowhere more strongly posited than in the case of the American civil rights movement. According to legend, Martin Luther King and his band of righteous acolytes galvanized the masses of black people and ushered them into the American franchise. But Payne (African-American Studies/Northwestern) attacks the myth on both its linguistic premises—``great'' and ``men''—offering in cogent detail a narrative of civil rights that features the historically unfeatured, adding new heft and weight to an often-told tale. Payne takes as an operating motif a quote from Gandhi, ``There go my people. I must hurry and catch up to them for I am their leader.'' There are familiar faces here, to be sure—Medgar Evers, Ella Baker—but Payne concerns himself with those he believes to have been the real actors in the drama for American freedom, the men and women in the rural communities across the South who left their homes and plowshares to agitate for freedom—people like Amzie Moore, a founder in 1951 of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which offered a collective voice to blacks in the Mississippi Delta. People like Septima Clark, who, fired from her teaching job for her NAACP membership, helped create Citizenship Schools to educate blacks. But Payne dares even further to reveal the profundity of mind present in the local leaders, arguing that the beliefs binding the people together was more than a sentimental, communitarian version of mother wit, but a conscientious philosophy of protest and activism, carefully conceived, arduously employed. In this thoughtful social history, Payne gives due regard to those activists great and small. (27 b&w photographs, map, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-08515-9
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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