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THE PRINCESS AND THE PROPHET

THE SECRET HISTORY OF MAGIC, RACE, AND MOORISH MUSLIMS IN AMERICA

A flawed yet erudite narrative about the founder of a precursor of the Nation of Islam.

A corrective portrait of an early-20th-century chameleon who became an influential Muslim leader.

In this dense social history, Dorman (History and Core Humanities/Univ. of Nevada; Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions, 2013) takes a largely nonjudgmental view of Noble Drew Ali (1886-1929), the controversial founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a forerunner of the Nation of Islam. Despite the author’s evenhanded approach, Ali emerges as a con artist of unusual audacity. In a prodigious feat of detective work, Dorman discovered that Ali was actually the circus magician Walter Brister, who faked his death in 1914 with the help of his wife, Eva, only to reappear years later and establish the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago. Styling himself as the Prophet Noble Drew Ali and Eva as the Grand Sheikess, he claimed to be the reincarnation of Muhammad and preached that black Americans “were in fact Asiatics of Islamic Moorish descent.” He flouted the law repeatedly: He had four wives simultaneously and was arrested for statutory rape, practicing medicine without a license, and the murder of an associate (a charge he beat, possibly by bribing the police). He made enough enemies that his death, officially attributed to tuberculosis and other causes, led some people to suspect he’d been poisoned. Dorman devotes much space to the antecedents of “Moorish Science”—e.g., Freemasonry, the Shriners, and “Orientalist tropes” like harems—which makes for a slow-paced narrative but one with a deep social context. He also finds Ali’s legacy in the fezzes worn by some rappers and in other pop-cultural outcroppings. At the end, he concludes that even if all the allegations about his subject are true, “there was something noble about Noble Drew Ali.” Given that Ali was credibly accused of murder and child rape, the special pleading suggests that the author stumbled into the biographer’s trap of falling in love with a subject who requires the clearer eye he shows elsewhere in the book.

A flawed yet erudite narrative about the founder of a precursor of the Nation of Islam.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8070-6726-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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