Rich in detail and solid storytelling: sure to awaken interest in the peculiar anti-institution.
A vivid reconstruction of abolitionism’s most daring act of rebellion, “an epic of high drama, moral courage, religious inspiration, and unexpected personal transformations played out by a cast of extraordinary personalities.”
The abolitionist movement, Bordewich (My Mother’s Ghost, 2000, etc.) notes, began not long after the Revolutionary War ended, and it began in the revolutionary hotbed of Philadelphia. Its earliest members were religious activists, though as the 19th century progressed, the Underground Railroad—the term refers to an interlocking system of routes and way stations by which slaves were afforded escape—became hydra-headed, with very little central direction, a great deal of individual initiative, and no set ideology save for one overarching goal: “to provide aid to any fugitive slave who asked for it.” In those early days, Bordewich writes, utmost secrecy was of the essence, for slavery was allowed and practiced everywhere in the US but Vermont; gradually, however, the North shed the “peculiar institution,” while Thomas Jefferson hazarded that the South would soon follow. Thus turn-of-the-century law required that fugitive slaves be returned to their owners, one reason that the Underground Railroad’s favored terminus was enlightened Canada, where fugitives found work as skilled construction workers, “as shoemakers, tailors, barbers, cooks, and agricultural laborers,” and even as some of the first tourist guides at Niagara Falls. Things became more complicated when slave states and free states butted heads: for instance, when free blacks in Cincinnati surrounded slaves on the way to Kentucky and urged them not to go any farther, and when a Philadelphia court ruled that the slave of a South Carolina senator resident in the city was a free man, having lived in Pennsylvania long enough to establish legal residency. It might have shocked some of the pacifist founders of the Underground Railroad, Bordewich ventures, to learn that their actions would in time help spark the Civil War—and perhaps even to know that abolitionism would directly beget feminism.
Rich in detail and solid storytelling: sure to awaken interest in the peculiar anti-institution.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-052430-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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 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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