A lengthy manifesto for AMCAP that lays out a vision for an ascendant black America.
Rempson (Minority Access to Higher Education In N.Y. City, 1972) examines what he sees as the root causes of education and economic-mobility gaps that affect African-American males.
The question of how to attain educational and economic equality with whites has been a central concern of African-American thought, dating back to W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. With this book, Rempson tracks its evolution to the present day, as embodied in the arguments of actor Bill Cosby and author Michael Eric Dyson; he also looks at the divisions that still exist among young African-American males regarding the so-called “cool-pose culture,” the idea of “acting white,” and the quality of black male role models, up to and including President Barack Obama. He then outlines his own concept to help combat the problem: the African American Male Career Pathway Program, AMCAP. The proposed after-school program would work to increase high school graduation and college attendance rates among young African-American men by exposing them to male role models, counselors, and volunteers, who would work closely with them to cultivate “their ability to handle peer pressure, to stay drug free, to manage their female and other relationships, and to achieve their other developmental tasks.” Rempson, the former dean of students at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College, is a lucid writer, if a long-winded one; his book is more 900 pages long, and a more concise version that spent less time ramping up to his plan might have encouraged a wider readership. Overall, he falls squarely on the side of placing responsibility on the African-American community: “Our own behavior…serves both to cause the problem and to hinder its solution….[R]ather than placing its remedy in the hands of white people…we must lead the way in its prevention and remedy.” Some may find the book’s platform to be a bit preachy. However, it’s clear that the author has spent many years thinking about the particular problems of the community and formulating customized solutions to help solve them, as embodied here.
A lengthy manifesto for AMCAP that lays out a vision for an ascendant black America.Pub Date: March 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7677-0
Page Count: 936
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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