A welcome contribution to the literature of Black political activism.
Comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party.
It is a measure of both the Black Panthers’ renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, “claimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.” Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot’s story, saying, “There were only about eight people here that belonged to the Black Panther Party. Two of those people worked for us.” Crawling with undercover police informants, its leadership under men such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton problematic, the BPP nonetheless made significant contributions to Black communities around the country. One of them was the distribution of free food to needy families, one of a series of social programs that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover “highlighted as the most subversive of its activities.” Hoover’s concern was symptomatic of the fear and loathing that the BPP excited among law enforcement officers in its short lifetime: indeed, by Street’s reckoning those agents killed more than 20 Panthers, and in places as far-flung as Des Moines, Seattle, and New Orleans charges were ginned up for crimes supposedly committed by party members. That the Panthers persisted in the face of so much opposition, distributing free food and offering high-quality health care and early education programs, “renders the social programs even more impressive.” Although Street criticizes the supposed monetization of the BPP experience that came with the publication of several memoirs, to say nothing of the Huey Newton Foundation’s hawking of a “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce, he also notes the view of most surviving members that their time in the party was invaluably positive, with one even going so far as to liken the militants’ charitable works to those of Jesus.
A welcome contribution to the literature of Black political activism.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780820366951
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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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