A well-crafted work of social history that highlights little-known aspects of pre–World War II America.
A sweeping history of minority self-help in the face of the Great Depression.
If UC Santa Cruz historian Frank’s book has a governing idea, it might be that, to quote Patti Smith, people have the power. In this instance, numerous people poleaxed by the Depression did not wait for the government to catch up, although Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did help ease the suffering; instead, Frank’s subjects, primarily minority members, formed mutual aid societies, helping the most affected with “burial insurance, health care, ethnic solidarity, and cultural sustenance.” In some instances, she adds, these mutual-aid endeavors were long embedded in minority cultures excluded from such things as bank loans and mortgages. As Frank writes, Black communities across the country were hardest hit by the Depression, with more than 40 percent of men unemployed against slightly more than 27 percent of white men. Whites also formed mutual-aid societies, Frank adds, but these typically provided them “a way to draw a circle around themselves and keep out those who they identified as nonwhite.” Frank describes other actions, including a little-documented strike by Black wet nurses, whose own children were being monitored by the health department to make sure they were healthy and not being neglected. Not all popular actions were progressive or noble: one case study concerns the rise, mostly in the Midwest, of a KKK offshoot called the Black Legion, who terrorized nonwhite populations (which, in the eyes of Legion members, included Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans). Frank suggests some level of cultural and social continuity in the fact that the Legion’s heartland is the heavily gerrymandered congressional district that Jim Jordan now represents.
A well-crafted work of social history that highlights little-known aspects of pre–World War II America.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780807046906
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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