A book that tells the story of a single life and a larger movement through tributes to the people whose faith, courage, imagination, and idealism made progress possible. Beginning with her girlhood in segregated South Carolina, Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, chronicles how “natural daily mentors” taught her not “how to make a living . . . but how to make a life.” Starting with her first mentors, her father, a Baptist pastor, and mother, who raised nearly a dozen foster children after his death, she recalls a tight-knit community and a circle of women who treated her as if she were their own, offering “buffers of love and encouragement!’ against a hostile world. When Edelman moved on to Spelman, the black women’s college, she encountered new mentors, such as Dr. Benjamin Mays, the president of neighboring Morehouse College, and met for the first time several white men who went out of their way to help. Howard Zinn, then a Spelman history professor, participated in student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and Charles Merrill Jr., scion of the Merrill Lynch fortune, not only provided financial backing, but also became Edelman’s close adviser. Upon her graduation from Yale Law School in the early “60s, the author’s work as a civil-rights attorney in Mississippi brought her into contact with such notable figures as Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, whose legislative assistant, Peter Edelman, she later married. But her recollections of lesser-known, yet vitally important figures such as Mae Bertha Carter, whose children were the first to integrate the public schools in a small Mississippi town, and Robert Moses, who masterminded Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, are at the heart of this book. Edelman ends with a series of challenges intended to inspire the next generation of mentors. By reminding us of those who had the courage to remake the not-too-distant past, Lanterns seeks to shed some light on the future. (30 b&w photos; not seen) (First printing of 150,000, author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8070-7214-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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