An important, riveting history lesson that, unfortunately, is still relevant today.
An articulate, poignant recollection of the almost two years Ivester and her family spent in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou during the turmoil of the civil rights movement.
“My parents were foot soldiers in President Johnson’s War on Poverty.” Thus begins Ivester’s debut, constructed from her writings and from journals kept by her mother, Aura Kruger. Ivester was only 10 when her father, a pediatrician in Newton, Massachusetts, decided to close his practice and relocate the white family to an all-black community in the rural South to open a much needed medical clinic. In August 1967, their three youngest children in tow, the Krugers moved into two trailers that would be their home until February 1969. While Leon focused on his new medical facility, Aura became a high school English teacher. With stark honesty, Aura’s writings reveal her anxieties and anger about uprooting her children and moving them into schools where they would be the only white students. She details the challenges of dealing with the Jim Crow laws still in effect in the South. The first time her students entered her classroom, they walked in silently, slowly, eyes cast down. “Many of these students had never seen a white person up close,” Ivester writes. “They’d been raised to fear white people, to always appear docile and unthreatening, to avoid eye contact.” Eventually, she was able to breach the color divide, using her class to introduce these teens to the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. Aura, more than anyone else in the Kruger family, found her voice and sense of purpose in Mound Bayou. Interspersed with Aura’s journal entries are black-and-white photos and recollected childhood writings from the author. Her young voice is haunting, reflecting confusion when she was teased for being Jewish and trauma when she was attacked and beaten by three older boys. What makes this book particularly valuable is its vivid depiction of the abhorrent consequences of legalized segregation. What gives it heart is the window it opens to the personal journeys of mother and daughter.
An important, riveting history lesson that, unfortunately, is still relevant today.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1631529641
Page Count: 238
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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