A succinct, discerning study of the nation’s first aborted attempt at racial equality.
A sterling account of Reconstruction, that misunderstood period of revolution and reaction following the Civil War.
Half the length and without the footnotes of Foner’s Bancroft Prize–winning Reconstruction (1988), this account introduces new scholarship and features evocative period art, including posters, cartoons and photographs. For nearly a century, historians characterized Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of GOP misrule and corruption by ignorant freedmen, Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags. Foner (History/Columbia Univ.) sees these as myths perpetrated by Southern merchants, planters and entrepreneurs out to disenfranchise former slaves. (If the North had been as vindictive after the Civil War as was claimed, Foner points out, then Confederate leaders would have been put on trial, with planters exiled en masse.) With Abraham Lincoln assassinated and the Radical Republicans’ program of land redistribution derailed, hopes for economic progress for freedmen were dealt crushing blows. Nevertheless, Foner shows, at the height of Reconstruction in the early 1870s, an unprecedented experiment—biracial democracy—had produced for the first time in the South tax-supported school systems and laws that protected laborers and outlawed discrimination. But labor unrest made Northerners more sympathetic to white Southerners’ objections to Reconstruction, and the Republicans grew increasingly reluctant to use federal troops to protect African-Americans from what Foner calls “domestic terrorism” perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. Six trenchant “visual essays” by Joshua Brown discuss how visual imagery often negatively influenced white attitudes toward African-Americans.
A succinct, discerning study of the nation’s first aborted attempt at racial equality.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40259-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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