A highly satisfying compendium that shines a welcome light onto the troubles of the present day.
Essays and newspaper articles on the civil-rights movement, written mostly in the 1950s and ’60s.
Newsweek managing editor Meacham writes in his introduction that he hopes this anthology will convey the battles that occurred in the hearts and minds of white and black Americans during the civil-rights movement. To a large extent, it does. Reading a 1958 Murray Kempton column on a trial involving a black man’s testimony against a white man, one despairs of what has happened to court reporting in the post–O.J. era. In “Wallace,” Marshall Frady portrays the vilified Alabama governor as a provincial who simply uses the race card to gain the attention he craves. Occasionally the authors give voice to the misconceptions of their time (as when William Faulkner predicts that the Soviet Union’s economy will eventually out-produce that of the US), but mostly these articles move one to see how print can often convey more of a moment than photographs and film. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has, unfortunately, been rendered trite by familiarity, but Ralph Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” succeeds in echoing King’s concerns from the perspective of a writer who is less optimistic but who hungers for the vision King sought to provide. The collection would have benefited if some of the same authors had contributed pieces looking back to the circumstances surrounding their writing. What might a writer like Frady say about Wallace’s turnabout on the race issue years later? The real misfortune is not simply that many of these writers are no longer on the scene, but that their successors have not been able to bring the same level of gravitas and moral urgency to a situation that, in many regards, has hardly improved at all in the intervening years.
A highly satisfying compendium that shines a welcome light onto the troubles of the present day.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-46296-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
