A transplanted Southerner explores the aftermath of the 1968 shootings of unarmed black college students by highway patrolmen in his hometown of Orangeburg, S.C.
When Shuler (English/Denison Univ.; Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights, 2009, etc.) came across a copy of The Orangeburg Massacre (1970) by Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, what he read launched him on a quest to discover how the town had dealt with the event in the wake of the violence and the current status of race relations there. The author traveled to Orangeburg in 2009 and 2010 and interviewed dozens of people, including both blacks and whites who were there in 1968. Among his interviewees were businessmen, ministers, the mayor, even a highway patrolman, who happened to be the author's great-uncle. Their stories often conflict, reflecting their complicated feelings, perceptions and prejudices, the "narratives deep in the blood and bone of the community.” What is not in dispute is that many black students were injured, three were killed and nine highway patrolmen were tried and found not guilty. No compensation was made to victims' families, and one black civil-rights activist was tried, convicted of rioting, jailed and later pardoned. Although public officials have issued apologies, Shuler makes clear that the reconciliation process is long and begins with listening to and paying attention to each other's stories. Orangeburg remains a town struggling with a damaged reputation and divided by race and class. It is also, the author points out, a symptom of a larger problem across the country, which demands that we look at our history closely and come to grips with the underlying issue of racism. Filled with the voices of men and women willingly or reluctantly responding to a journalist's probing, Shuler's report paints a dark picture with glimmers of light.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61117-048-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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