Will foment new scholarly debates and bring the finest fruits of academic work to a broad audience.
A cogent analysis of culture and race in early 20th-century America that ranks with such classics as Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness (1998) and Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999).
Look around a grocery store, subway or church: many of the people we now think of as ‘white’ would have been viewed as distinctly not white just a century ago. That’s the premise with which Roediger (History/Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) opens his exploration of how fin de siècle immigrants to America negotiated race. Back in 1900, “Slavonic” and “Latin” were understood to be racial designations, just like “white” and “black.” By 1950, that had changed; Jews, Italians, Poles, the Irish and other European immigrants were considered as white as Betsy Ross. How and why did this transformation take place? According to Roediger, many factors were at work. Immigrants who wanted to marry outside their ethnic group quickly learned that whiteness was crucial, since laws forbade dating and marriage between people perceived to be of different races. Second-generation immigrant kids defied their parents to become friends with children of different ethnicities. Roediger’s title is a double-entendre: immigrants worked or strived to become white; and the jobs they held, as well as their participation in the labor movement, shaped their racial status. One of Roediger’s most interesting arguments has to do with housing. Home ownership is an indicator of the extent to which immigrant groups had been accepted into mainstream, white American society, he acknowledges, but immigrants “did not so much ‘buy into’ the American Dream of home ownership as help create it.” They made significant sacrifices to own homes, and helped turn a house into a badge of success.
Will foment new scholarly debates and bring the finest fruits of academic work to a broad audience.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-07073-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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