A must for the look-it-up shelf and a poignant reminder of how far we have come—and have yet to go.
A stirring chronology of advances—and some backward steps—in the long struggle for African-American civil rights.
The subtitle is a touch imprecise, for Martin Luther King is still alive at the beginning of Gates (African-American Studies/Harvard Univ.; Finding Your Roots, 2014, etc.) and Burke’s compendium, a companion to the forthcoming PBS series. It is Malcolm X, instead, who falls just two pages in, a victim of an internal struggle within the Black Muslim movement. As the authors observe, his memoir soon became “a canonical text for the Black Power movement,” selling 6 million copies within 10 years. Ten days after Malcolm’s funeral, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten in Selma, Alabama, launching King’s march to Montgomery and affirming the commitment of the Lyndon Johnson administration to civil rights at the federal level. Two dozen pages in, and King has fallen as well, killed at the age of 39, “the same age Malcolm X was when he was assassinated three years prior.” The year 1968 would mark much upheaval, symbolized by medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raising of the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics. Gates and Burke chart political and social events alongside the incalculable influence of black culture on mainstream American culture, from Broadway (James Earl Jones, “long before he is known as the voice of Darth Vader,” won a Tony in 1969) to music (“Although most of the audience is white, African American performers star at the three-day Woodstock music festival in upstate New York”) to sports and science, the latter represented most visibly by the immensely popular interpreter of cosmology Neil deGrasse Tyson. Presented in accessible entries seldom exceeding 100 words, the chronology is richly illustrated with images both iconic and seldom seen, making this especially useful as a visual reference for readers too young to have scenes from the early years burned into their memories.
A must for the look-it-up shelf and a poignant reminder of how far we have come—and have yet to go.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242700-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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