A provocative look at a long shadow cast over the nation’s past and present.
A sharp history in which the author argues that the Civil War has been raging for more than a century and a half—and the Confederacy is winning.
The Civil War “ended only militarily at Appomattox,” writes Suri, the chair of leadership in global affairs at the University of Texas. It has been waged in venues other than the battlefield ever since, often with the aid of those who would have been Unionists in 1861. The battle flag in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, notes the author, came from a latter-day secessionist in Delaware, a 51-year-old White man for whom the Confederate cause “remained alive.” Moreover, it remained alive in various nonimaginary ways: voter suppression, Jim Crow segregationism, lynchings, and spasms of insurrection. In the last case, Suri reminds readers that the smoke had barely cleared from the battlefield when Whites in Memphis rebelled against Union martial law, which was enforced by Black soldiers. The Union general in charge “told investigators that the hostility of the white citizens in Memphis was simply too great and that his forces were too small to counter it,” and no insurrectionists were punished. Once the war was formally over, Whites on both sides essentially abandoned the Black population to their fate, with Reconstruction jettisoned owing to Andrew Johnson’s White supremacism and Ulysses S. Grant’s failure to press for universal civil rights. The result was a Lost Cause narrative that enabled Southerners, would-be and actual, then and now, to imagine themselves as the victims of the war. The author clearly shows that with the death of James Garfield in 1881, the victorious Union gave up on trying to “build an inclusive, multiracial democracy.” Few of Suri’s observations are groundbreaking, but his prescriptions for finishing that job are meaningful all the same, including “a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote.”
A provocative look at a long shadow cast over the nation’s past and present.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5854-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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