Solid work on all fronts, particularly for readers without much background in the life and times of Jim Crow.
A sturdy examination of the famed Supreme Court case that made America safe for apartheid for more than half a century.
In 1892, writes Fireside (Emeritus/Ithaca College; Brown v. Board of Education, 1994), an octoroon—that is, one-eighth black—Louisianan named Homer Plessy refused to relinquish his seat in a whites-only railroad car. It was a premeditated protest; “Plessy repeated what he had prepared to say: that he had properly bought a first-class ticket and was therefore entitled to stay where he was.” The passengers were a tad confused, for Plessy appeared white; yet by Louisiana law, anyone with even a drop of “colored blood” was nonwhite, and so Plessy was charged with crimes “against the peace and dignity of the State.” Freed on bond, Plessy mounted a spirited defense against the charges and challenged Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws. Eventually, the matter went before the US Supreme Court, which in 1896 ruled against Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, holding “that [the Louisiana law] does not conflict with the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument.” Fireside considers the Court’s ruling in the context of contemporary judicial theory—“until the New Deal revolution, three decades into the next century,” the Court allowed the individual states considerable leeway in matters of racial segregation by virtue of the Tenth Amendment—and in the context of the larger society, which was stunningly racist. So much so, Fireside observes, that the founder of the Ku Klux Klan resigned from the presidency, “evidently aghast at the widespread murders and lynchings being committed by vigilante thugs in the KKK’s name,” which apparently didn’t bother the locals much, even as the Supreme Court argued that the law was “powerless to eradicate social instincts.”
Solid work on all fronts, particularly for readers without much background in the life and times of Jim Crow.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1293-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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