Provocative and well-argued with plenty of clues on what to watch for in the coming presidential race.
An exploration of the relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, proving to be salutary reading for anyone who still believes that we live in a post-racial society.
Recent events in South Carolina, Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere would suggest that we’re going backward when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity. Against this backdrop, the Republican mainstream in particular has made hay of white resentment over supposed favoritism, in the form of affirmative action and other measures, meant to “add economic stability to the...basic rights for African Americans (and poor whites),” as MSNBC correspondent Reid observes. Against this divided politics, it’s small wonder that “Democrats are the only ball game” for African-Americans, the product of a generational shift that began with Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights programs of the 1960s, which he recognized would drive Southern voters into the arms of a welcoming GOP. Before Johnson, writes the author, only Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal had done much to “lift large swaths of African Americans out of despair,” further disposing African-American voters to the Democratic cause. All that said, as Reid shows, Obama, a beneficiary of both Democratic-backed civil rights measures and of African-American votes, has seemingly been strangely reluctant to engage in discussions of race. A case in point, writes the author, is the upswelling of GOP efforts to strengthen voter ID requirements, “just one weapon Republican state legislatures and governors could use against minority voters.” Obama offered only modest assurances that if voters wished to vote, they would find ways to prevail. Reid’s book slightly precedes a shift in Obama’s tone following the Charleston shootings, so some of her conclusions may require modest updating, but her point remains important: the racial divide persists, and Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate in 2016, will have to court African-American voters while delicately maintaining some distance from Obama in the eyes of white voters.
Provocative and well-argued with plenty of clues on what to watch for in the coming presidential race.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-230525-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
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