Berlin and Rowland, editors of the prize-winning collection Free at Last, have come up with another moving documentary history, this one focusing on black family life in the Civil War era. Told mostly from the perspectives of black soldiers and their families, these poignant letters show the devotion and love that existed among African-American relatives despite all efforts to destroy slave families. Slaves were usually discouraged by their masters from forming familial relationships—they were split up regularly when relatives were sold; there was no official recognition of slave marriages—yet many slaves managed to nurture close families. During the Civil War, these relationships were sorely tested, as families were again separated, women and children left, even after liberation, among their embittered former owners. Yet it is hard to say who was more destructive of the black family during the war—the North or the South. The federal government was shameful in its treatment of black soldiers fighting for the Union: Letters here attest to the fact that they were often forcefully conscripted and received less than half the pay of their white counterparts. Their families receieved little or none of the promised assistance, and the soldiers were denied furlough or required to pay dearly for it, even when the war was over. As one ``umble soldier'' who could not get leave wrote to the secretary of war to beg permission to visit his family: ``In August I lost two of my children. I asked for a leaf [sic] of absence and was refused. . . . Now the war is over and I now want to see those who are dearer to me than my life.'' A revealing history about the precarious state of black families during and after the Civil War. (36 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1997
ISBN: 1-56584-026-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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