A much-needed comprehensive contribution to slavery history.
The Underground Railroad travels to the sea.
Prolific historian Rediker tells the inspiring story of enslaved people who escaped not by land but by sea during the three decades before the Civil War, largely from Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, and Baltimore. This Underground Railroad had its origins on the waterfront—“A voice called from the ocean and thousands answered”—prompting Southern states to pass laws to curb these escapes. Throughout, Rediker profiles a number of sea escapees. William Grimes wrote the first escape-by-sea narrative in 1825. Moses Roper’s escape of 4,400 miles over 16 months was “one of the longest and most grueling on record.” After escaping, it was common for fugitives to be pursued by their angry owners. The author discusses how the growth of port cities, especially New York, with their burgeoning commodity chains, created new jobs for Blacks—and escape routes. Rediker estimates that some 20,000 sailors were free or enslaved men of color. Harriet Tubman helped the enslaved escape via Baltimore’s Chesapeake Bay. The sea shaped Frederick Douglass’ “storied life in profound ways.” Harriet Jacobs’ maritime victory over her vicious slave owner was “one of the great triumphs in the history of resistance to slavery.” White abolitionist Jonathan Walker “raised maritime marronage to national and international visibility.” For his antislavery efforts, he was arrested, beaten, and branded on his palm. Abolitionist William P. Powell was a “crucial although little-known figure” who helped hundreds escape by sea, mainly via his Colored Sailors Home in Manhattan. Boston’s “free Black community…served as a bedrock of the local abolitionist movement,” but more fugitives sailed or steamed their way from Philadelphia and New York via the growing “business of escape.” Rediker estimates that 15,000 to 20,000 “hidden historymakers” escaped by sea.
A much-needed comprehensive contribution to slavery history.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525558347
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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