Candid testimony from impressive and influential women.
African-American women contributed significantly to the campaign for racial justice.
An Emmy-winning TV and radio producer, social justice activist Bell makes her literary debut with a revealing collection of oral histories by nine African-American women prominent in the civil rights movement. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the book follows the careers of New Orleans chef and restaurant owner Leah Chase; psychiatrist June Jackson Christmas; Aileen Hernandez, the first African-American president of the National Organization of Women; Diane Nash, who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Judy Richardson, co-founder of Drum and Spear bookstore and Drum and Spear Press, devoted to publishing and promoting African-American literature; Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to serve on the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party; Gay McDougall, an international human rights activist who focused on ending apartheid in South Africa; Gloria Richardson, whom Ebony magazine called “the Lady General of Civil Rights”; and Myrlie Evers, widow of slain activist Medgar Evers, who later served as chair of the NAACP. Common to all were a spirit of determination and unflagging resilience as they struggled against racism and sexism. Christmas, for example, faced prejudice growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she discovered that a Girl Scout camp and the YWCA both had racial prohibitions. At Vassar, as one of two African-American girls, she was advised that it would “be best for you if you don’t have a roommate.” Later, she was one of seven women in her medical school class and, again, one of two African-Americans. She was denied a residency at New York Hospital, told that “men would be very disturbed by you and stimulated by you.” Most, like McDougall, were raised in a family “where caring and addressing a situation was important.” They were expected to pursue an education, and many ended up at prestigious schools—Swarthmore, Barnard, Yale, Bennington, Howard—where classes and extracurricular activities fueled their motivation.
Candid testimony from impressive and influential women.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-335-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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