Eminently readable despite its narrow academic lens.
A plantation-owning senator and an impoverished farmer face off in the Mississippi Delta.
There is little doubt that the author is deeply invested in Sunflower County, Miss., where he worked for years as an educator and activist, but Asch may have stuffed too much information about his adopted home into a single book. It not only chronicles the life and work of Sunflower’s most renowned residents, longtime Senator James Eastland and civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, but also the intricate details of the Delta cotton industry and the origins of pioneer Dixie settlements. The spotlight shines brightest on Eastland, scion of Sunflower’s most prestigious plantation family, who was elected to the Senate in 1942 on the strength of his pro-cotton platform. When the Jim Crow status quo was threatened, he found his voice as one of the country’s most devout white supremacists. Eastland eventually landed the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, affording him significant power until his retirement in 1978, and capably dispatched several key civil-rights bills. But back home in Sunflower, he found a formidable opponent in Hamer, the youngest child in a brood of 20 born to sharecropping farmers. After a failed attempt at voter registration led to her arrest, unemployment and indigence, Hamer joined the civil-rights movement. She took on everyone from Democratic Party demagogues to Big Cotton. However, remarks the author in closing, Sunflower County today remains “resiliently separate and unequal.” The book sometimes suffers from Asch’s overuse of his meticulous research: Countless, often tangential quotations crowd lengthy passages of pedantic exposition, slowing the narrative flow. Hamer doesn’t make much of an appearance until well into the book’s second half—a shame, as she’s far more compelling than the exhaustive catalogue of Eastland’s policy work the author provides instead. However, Asch has crafted an objective, engaging and authoritative portrait of two polarizing figures.
Eminently readable despite its narrow academic lens.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59558-332-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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