An entertainingly provocative and informative reading experience.
Two cultural studies scholars offer a darkly humorous guide to Black history.
In this collaboration, Glover and Prince seek to challenge views that Black Americans are solely defined by the brutality of their history. Toward that end, the authors organize the text around the great cultural “luminaries” who have not only “transcend[ed] the boundaries” imposed on Black Americans, but also demonstrated their (very human) imperfections by showing themselves to be “crazy as hell.” The authors gather those figures under categories they see as representative of important Black cultural archetypes. Glover and Prince begin with “The Runaway,” offering brief stories of well-known enslaved people who were able to escape—e.g., Harriet Tubman, who returned to the South “at least nineteen times” to lead other enslaved people to freedom, and Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read and write and beat up a former master who mistreated him. Several categories, including “The Badass,” “The Outlaw,” and “The Lawless,” emphasize the way the heroes discussed in those sections (Muhammad Ali, Assata Shakur, Shirley Chisholm, Jack Johnson) were not only “bold enough to do something other folks [considered] crazy,” but also courageous enough to show no fear in evading unfair laws. Other sections, including “The Funky” and “The Black Intellectual and The Activist,” emphasize the fabulously boundary-breaking creativity and thinking demonstrated by brilliant eccentrics, from funk music godfather George Clinton and writer Zora Neale Hurston to Flavor Flav, Erykah Badu, and the Wu-Tang Clan. The final section introduces “The Unwitting Representatives of the Anonymous Masses,” a category that includes Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and George Floyd. As it entertains and enlightens, this book also makes readers keenly aware that the “craziness” demonstrated by Black heroes is a direct response to the madness of a racist American society.
An entertainingly provocative and informative reading experience.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781324078876
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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