Patterson guides us with consummate skill through a hall of social heroes populated by courageous parents and students,...
A prize-winning historian (Grand Expectations, not reviewed) revisits the 1954 school-desegregation decision and traces its effects on American social history.
Patterson (History/Brown Univ.) argues convincingly that race remains at the center of many of America’s social problems and that “[t]he complicated issues that Brown tried to resolve in 1954 still torment Americans half a century later.” Patterson begins with a sad snapshot of American life before Brown, when the nation maintained a dual system of education for whites and blacks that kept the races separate and unequal(especially in the South. In the early 1950s, the NAACP and its principal attorney, Thurgood Marshall, decided to attack school segregation. Patterson humanizes Marshall, showing his playfulness, his doggedness, his patience, and—toward the end—his bitterness at the glacial progress of social justice. The author reminds readers that Brown was a constellation of cases, not a single one: the Supreme Court first heard arguments in 1952 but delayed ruling and ordered a rehearing in 1953. By then, Earl Warren was on the court, and Patterson shows how he worked skillfully behind the scenes to gain a consensus on the decision, which he delivered on May 17, 1954. Southern whites employed three principal strategies to deal with the decision (and with the 1955 order containing the now-classic phrase “with all deliberate speed”): violence, delay, and deception. Patterson argues that it was the civil-rights movement rather than Brown, however, that prompted the most spectacular advances (viz., the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). Patterson then chronicles the continuing efforts to achieve equality in education—with discussions of court-ordered busing, magnet schools, affirmative action, school finance, and the slow turn to the right taken by the Rehnquist court.
Patterson guides us with consummate skill through a hall of social heroes populated by courageous parents and students, tireless attorneys, and resolute judges. (39 b&w photos; 1 map, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-512716-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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