Essential to any Civil War collection and a book that invites rereading.
Documentary survey of the last days of slavery and the Black troops who helped end it.
At the beginning, MacArthur fellow Willis, the director of the NYU Institute for African American Affairs and the Center for Black Visual Culture, observes that “the photograph became the mechanical visual evidence that slavery existed, as did its resistance.” Memorable images abound in the historical catalog of American photography. First in the images of Black soldiers are cartes de visite, in which many are depicted standing ramrod straight with rifles in hand or seated with thoughtful, resolute looks on their faces. Though most soldiers couldn’t afford it, they proudly sent them home nonetheless. One such posed photograph is less formal though no less thoughtful, depicting 65-year-old Nicholas Biddle, a Pennsylvania soldier wounded by a hurled brick while marching through pro-Confederate Baltimore—and thus earning the distinction of being the first soldier to be wounded in the Civil War. As Willis notes, thousands of Black soldiers served the Confederacy, mostly in ancillary positions. One she highlights was a young Mississippi man, enslaved from birth, who served alongside the son of his owner in battle until the hostilities ended, whereupon he was awarded a pension as a Confederate veteran. “The perplexing relationships between slave masters and enslaved soldiers reflect the mystery of the human condition in this period,” Willis writes. Otherwise, most of the photographs depicted free Black soldiers in Union uniforms, soldiers and sailors who fought in large numbers for the cause of abolition and national unity. That they had cause to do so is self-evident, though the point is driven home by the image of “Whipped Peter,” a Union private who, while enslaved, had been scourged to the extent that he had horrific permanent welts on his back, providing a powerful symbol demanding an end to enslavement. The carefully constructed text, often incorporating letters and diary entries, is a winning complement to this superb collection of documentary images.
Essential to any Civil War collection and a book that invites rereading.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4798-0900-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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