A concise, solid biography of “the first revolutionary abolitionist,” a diminutive man who was decades ahead of his time.
A biography of a nearly forgotten Quaker whose life still resonates.
In his youth, Benjamin Lay (1681-1759), born in Colchester, England, was an unschooled shepherd and glover. Though a hunchback and not much taller than 4 feet, he became a common sailor. The Caribbean island of Barbados, where he became a merchant, was a major center of the world slave trade. As Rediker (Atlantic History/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail, 2014, etc.) notes, this was where Lay viewed firsthand the manifold evils of the traffic in human beings, leading to his career as a fervent and intractable abolitionist. With his wife, Sarah, who matched his mighty spirit, Lay moved to Pennsylvania to join the Society of Friends. There, he quickly made himself unwelcome through his fervent preaching against slavery, especially targeting fellow Friends who kept slaves. In a form of guerrilla theater, at one meeting, clad in a military tunic, he stabbed a concealed bladder with a sword, spattering nearby Quakers with blood-red juice. Lay was formally disowned by various groups as he persisted in his demands for piety, humility, and reverence for all life. Through it all, he practiced what he preached, living in a cave, making his own clothes, and growing his own food (he was a staunch vegetarian). Ascetic and religious and also an autodidact, Lay compiled a significant text, which was largely a commonplace book with lessons from the Old Testament and the book of Revelation as well as classical philosophy. Titled, clearly enough, All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, it was edited and published by his good friend Benjamin Franklin. Relying on Lay’s book and pamphlets, Quaker records, and contemporaneous accounts, Rediker provides a valuable addition to abolitionist historiography.
A concise, solid biography of “the first revolutionary abolitionist,” a diminutive man who was decades ahead of his time.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3592-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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