A fascinating retelling of modern history that restores Africa to its rightful place.
A Black journalist reframes modern history by restoring Africa to its rightful place at the center of the story.
In his latest sweeping book, French, a journalism professor at Columbia and former New York Times foreign correspondent, argues that Europe’s conquest of the world was driven not by a desire for access to Asia, but rather a yearning for the modernity and economic prosperity of Africa. The author believes that restoring Africa’s true place in world history and current affairs is a step toward combatting the racist “diminishment, trivialization, and erasure” of Africans from world history. To this end, French traces “the deeply twinned and tragic history of Africa and Europe that began with geopolitical collisions in the fifteenth century.” The author maintains a particular focus on the roles of African gold, sugar, and slavery in shaping the modern global economy. Throughout, French dispels countless historical myths, including many that render Africans disempowered victims rather than key actors. For example, the author recounts how, in the 1440s, Portugal stopped raiding African countries for slaves, opting instead to negotiate trade agreements with powerful African leaders who profited from the sale of their own people. French also describes the ways in which—despite being painted as a backward continent—African industries were more sophisticated than European ones. The Portuguese were especially covetous of textiles and metalwork Africans produced using complex techniques unknown in Europe. The author effectively argues that these early beginnings shaped the modern era all the way to African independence movements in the World War II era. This meticulously researched book eloquently debunks conventional understanding of European conquest. While each page is so densely packed with facts that it sometimes feels more like a textbook than creative nonfiction, French’s underlying argument and accompanying cogent analysis make for essential reading for anyone looking to decolonize their understanding of the Western world.
A fascinating retelling of modern history that restores Africa to its rightful place.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-582-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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