Sometimes dense but always engaging account of how the path to freedom was paved, in part, with written words.
Hager (English and American Studies/Trinity Coll.) debuts with an examination of the emerging literacy of slaves and former slaves in the decades around the Civil War.
The author begins his analysis with a document written by a person known to history only as “A Colored Man,” a slave who in 1863 New Orleans, copied and commented on the U.S. Constitution. This text allows Hager the opportunity to outline his case, to speculate about the relationship between freedom and literacy, and to note how many slaves saw literacy as a way to enter a society that had systematically excluded them for centuries. The author focuses on texts that, in most cases, were not published—or written for publication. Although he supplies some history when needed (e.g., Nat Turner and the Emancipation Proclamation), his interest is not so much in external events as in the internal activities that were producing words and texts. He discusses an 1852 letter from Maria Perkins, for example, and notices how some sought to emulate the conventions they had learned from the writing of whites. Hager suggests we need a term for a genre he calls “the enslaved narrative,” personal stories written by people still enslaved, not by the liberated or the escaped. An interesting section involves the writing of William Gould and the gradual emergence of the word we in his diary as he began to feel more a part of the literate world. Another category of documents are the letters of protest written during and after the war by African Americans complaining about their treatment, in some cases their maltreatment by Union soldiers. Hager also examines the emerging publications for black writers and readers.
Sometimes dense but always engaging account of how the path to freedom was paved, in part, with written words.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-05986-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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