A collection of historical articles and theoretical essays by the author of SNCC: The New Abolitionists, (1964). Zinn holds that historians must write as participant-observers in contemporary social struggles, not "passive reporters" committed to a callous and impossible neutrality. A view familiar by now, but Zinn offers a fine example here in his firsthand report of police-FBI violence in Albany, Georgia. The theme of official violence is pursued in papers on the napalming of Royan, France in 1945 and the 1912 massacre of unarmed Ludlow strikers by the Colorado militia. In tackling FDR as experimenter and LaGuardia as crusader, Zinn uses homey praise; he does better in polemics, as when he mops up Lewis Feuer's parricide theory of student revolt. A final group of essays discusses vague abstractions-humanitarianism, economic security, freedom—without the practical content required by Zinn's own approach. The pointless name-dropping and recrudescence of trivia exhibited by some of the articles may represent tacit accommodation to academic pressures. . . but the book also embodies a reassertion of intellectual integrity and social purpose which motivate the forceful, compassionate sketches of Ludlow, Royan and Albany. If less psychologically and historiographically sensitive than Duberman's The Uncompleted Past, (1969) and less assured than Chomsky's The New Mandarins, (1969), it's a stimulating contribution by a young professor with considerable drawing power for the same audience.
Pub Date: May 1, 1970
ISBN: 0252061225
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1970
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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