A spirited history of labor's triumph.
An account of an unprecedented 1930s strike that tested the power of factory workers.
In 1908, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, and Chevrolet merged to become General Motors, making Flint, Michigan, the nation’s automobile capital. Now better known for its scandalous water crisis, Flint in the 1930s became famous as the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, which mounted a 1936 sit-down strike that ended in workers’ success. Drawing on newspaper reports, memoirs, and oral histories of more than 100 strikers, McClelland uses present-tense narration to create a sense of immediacy and tension among workers locked in their plant, the Flint community in upheaval, and the protracted process of frustrating negotiations. Efforts to unionize had repeatedly failed, not least because GM “spent nearly $1 million on Pinkerton spies to infiltrate the workforce and report on union activity.” The advent of the steel-body car, which led to the speedup of the assembly line, intensified workers’ discontent; finally, they agreed to a sit-down strike, “more effective than walking out of a plant because if workers abandon their machinery, the bosses can hire scabs to get it running again.” McClelland creates lively portraits of the many players in his well-populated history: among them, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan (later benefactor of the grant-giving Sloan Foundation and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), who was “by his own admission, a ‘narrow man’ with no interests whatsoever outside the business world”; Franklin Roosevelt’s feisty labor secretary, Frances Perkins; and Michigan governor Frank Murphy, an advocate for a strong labor movement to rein in the profit system. A champion of unions, McClelland attributes their successes to the rise of the now-beleaguered middle class and urges a renewal of union activity. “A sit-down strike is not an obsolete tactic,” he writes. “The blueprint for better working conditions, and for a revival of the middle class, is in this book.”
A spirited history of labor's triumph.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3967-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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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