Companion volume to a PBS documentary on the 761st Tank Battalion, which led the Allied advance in WW II Europe and helped liberate Dachau and Buchenwald. The crux of this remarkable story isn't just the exploits of the 761st, perhaps the best battalion in Patton's Third Army. What really matters is that the 761st was all-black (with white officers) and thus represents, as portrayed here by filmmakers Miles and Rosenblum and screenwriter Potter, the triumph of courage over racism. The emotional highlight of the 761st's saga was the liberation of Jews from two of Hitler's worst concentration camps, described here as ``the coming—in the eleventh hour—of one despised and rejected people to the rescue of another.'' Given this subtext of the struggle for freedom, the writers wisely broaden their horizons and begin with an exposition of the history of black warriors in America—from the story of runaway slave Crispus Attucks up to the eve of WW II, when the US military still denied blacks any real leadership or combat positions. With the war, a crucial opportunity arose, and, thanks to the pleading of Eleanor Roosevelt and others, the 761st was born. In battle, the black tankers made history, not least when their lives intertwined with those of Jewish camp victims. The accounts of liberation are heart- rending (survivor Ben Bender: ``I was seeing black soldiers for the first time in my life, crying like babies, carrying the dead and the starved and trying to help everybody''). The 150 b&w photos included here—of black soldiers triumphant in Hitler's garden; of Buchenwald victims; of a KKK march in Washington, D.C.; of a Jim Crow sign at a bus station in North Carolina—capture the extent of this transcontinental battle for human rights and liberation from terror, and of its almost unbearable poignancy. A hitherto hidden history revealed in all its glory.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-151283-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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 Yorkerstaff 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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