Four dead in Ohio, indeed—but Backderf’s vivid, evocative book does a splendid job of keeping their memories alive.
An excellent graphic retelling of a climactic moment in American history.
Kent State University represented a slice of the American dream, a place where the children of blue-collar workers in northern Ohio could gain an education. Most of the students, as accomplished Backderf shows, were intent on gaining that education and, with luck, staying out of Vietnam. Three events conspired against them: Richard Nixon declared the invasion of Cambodia on a Friday night when National Guardsmen, already riled up by a labor strike in the author’s hometown, were dispatched to Kent State to contain student demonstrations. Kent State, he writes, was “hardly a hotbed of radical politics.” Even so, there were representatives of five law enforcement organizations on campus, including undercover FBI agents, as well as 1,200 National Guardsmen, who were ready for a fight. When one squad among them decided to shoot, perhaps directed to do so by a senior officer, at least a quarter of the soldiers fired directly into the ranks of the student demonstrators. Backderf raises a number of points that other chroniclers—especially James Michener, an apologist for law and order—failed to emphasize: Some Guardsmen, reviled and insulted by the students, were clearly out for blood; though depicted as kids, like the students they faced, most were in their 30s, with “little in common with the bohemian, far younger college students of 1970.” Nixon and the FBI, among others, wanted to make an example of the students. As the author’s notes show, he’s done more homework than other writers, too. The shooting may have been a “calamitous blunder,” but in the end—and Backderf’s depiction is gruesome—four students died, one, ironically, an Army officer in training. And the Guardsmen? After a long coverup, with destruction of evidence, not a single one has been held accountable or punished for murders in which Nixon exalted—and an astonishing number of Americans endorsed.
Four dead in Ohio, indeed—but Backderf’s vivid, evocative book does a splendid job of keeping their memories alive.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3484-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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