A brief, serviceable historical overview.
The large-scale detainment of specific ethnic groups by the U.S. government goes back a long way, writes journalist Dickerson.
The author covers many instances from colonial times to the present day, but the bulk of the narrative focuses on policies instituted during World War II. Most readers will have heard about the 1942 internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans; Dickerson details many stories of affected citizens and their families, from the unknown to the relatively famous, including Star Trek actor George Takei. Less well-known is the fact that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were interned as well, with some placed in an internment camp built on Ellis Island. The author also writes about Jewish refugees from Italy, some of whom had already been in Nazi concentration camps, who were detained for months at Camp Ontario in Oswego, N.Y., as the government tried to figure out what to do with them. Dickerson touches on the use of similar prison camps in more recent years for undocumented immigrants. He is at his most engaging when he focuses on the camps’ human impact. One Italian opera singer living in New York was imprisoned for three months because it was mistakenly alleged that he knew Mussolini. People returned from unjust internments only to be shunned by suspicious neighbors, even family members. Doris Berg, whose law-abiding German-American father and American mother were interned, remembered that her mother-in-law told her, “Doris, if the government didn’t have anything on your folks they wouldn’t have taken them away.” Indeed, if one point becomes clear after reading this book, it’s that the xenophobia that drives governments to imprison their own people can have deep personal and moral consequences.
A brief, serviceable historical overview.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-806-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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