Giving credit where it is long overdue, Olson makes a welcome addition to civil-rights literature.
A celebration of largely forgotten players in the African-American struggle for civil rights.
Freelance journalist Olson, coauthor of The Murrow Boys (1996), profiles a score or so of the women who spearheaded major advances in the civil-rights movement. They include Pauli Murray, whose 1944 sit-in at a lunch counter in Washington, D.C., inspired many other such demonstrations during the next two decades; Mary Church Terrell, whose determined activism over many years finally led, in 1953, to the collapse of segregation in the nation’s capital; and Jo Ann Robinson, who organized the 1956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Some of Olson’s heroines are better known than these, most notably Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Pauli Murray credited with bringing the civil-rights movement to the attention of not only her husband but also subsequent presidents, especially Kennedy. Olson connects these biographical sketches by tracing commonalities and recurrent themes, observing that the two major episodes in the struggle for black freedom and equality, one launched in the early 1800s and the other in the early 1960s, gave rise to parallel movements for women’s rights. African-American women, she adds, sometimes found themselves torn between supporting a civil-rights movement in which their contributions were consistently overlooked and throwing themselves wholly into feminism. Olson notes that these women’s stories were sometimes distorted by male civil-rights leaders; Martin Luther King Jr., for example, carefully portrayed Rosa Parks as an uncomplaining woman prompted by one injustice too many to refuse to move to the back of an Alabama bus, when she had in fact “been a committed civil rights activist in the 1940s, a staunch member of the NAACP with a history of rebellion against the casual cruelties of white bus drivers.”
Giving credit where it is long overdue, Olson makes a welcome addition to civil-rights literature.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85012-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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