A valuable contribution to the history of the Chinese in North America, allowing the formerly nameless to emerge “as real...
A well-researched history of the “Railroad Chinese,” those who traveled to the United States to build the transcontinental railway system but were thereafter mostly forgotten.
As Chang (History/Stanford Univ.; Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China, 2015) notes, the lives and fates of the Chinese railroad workers who labored to build steel lines across mountains and deserts are not well-documented; much is an argument from silence, barring the discovery of “that elusive prize, the diary of a Railroad Chinese.” What is certain is that many thousands arrived, traveling freelance or having been recruited from villages and cities in China. Drawing on family memories, government records, archaeological reports, and other materials, Chang reconstructs their difficult work and the social organization that underlay it, with young workers led by somewhat older foremen and labor brokers. Some arrived during the various gold rushes of 19th-century California, where they “frequently worked in teams on claims abandoned by white miners” and learned skills that would prove essential in later railroad work. Praised as “very good working hands,” they were also subject to racism at every level of American society and were often the victims of violence—e.g., the case of “a Chinaman,” as the court record calls a man named Ling Sing, who was repeatedly shot by a white man who escaped punishment thanks to laws that forbade nonwhites from testifying against whites. “Where Ling Sing is buried is not known," writes the author. The identities and pasts of so many others who died in construction accidents are similarly unknown, and although Railroad Chinese participated in strikes and asserted their rights, most disappeared after the lines were built, some to return to China, others to find work as farmers and laborers in places like New Orleans and California’s Central Valley.
A valuable contribution to the history of the Chinese in North America, allowing the formerly nameless to emerge “as real historical actors.”Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-61857-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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