Most of this lies on ground Jill Lepore covers in the superior New York Burning (2005), which offers broader historical...
In 1712 and again in 1741, black New Yorkers rose up, killed white owners and neighbors, and threatened the city with fire. Many paid with their lives—and then were all but forgotten.
African-Americans had not forgotten, though, writes novelist Johnson (Hunting in Harlem, 2003, etc.), and when the African Burial Ground above Wall Street was discovered in the early 1990s, it became “a chance to grieve for the atrocities of the past and mourn for the nameless who came before them.” Thanks to colonial recorder Daniel Horsmanden, the alleged perpetrators of the 1741 conspiracy to burn New York had names, most of them Spanish, with smatterings of Dutch. These black men and women—about 160 in all—were implicated through chains of denunciation at whose center stood a 16-year-old white servant named Mary Burton, who personally witnessed and overheard plans to make a great murderous conflagration—or so she said. Burton may or may not have done so, but no matter; as Johnson writes, “People believed that the Great Negro Plot, regardless of the evidence, was a real threat, and this in itself brought real consequences. White people believed it. Black people believed it.” In the end, after the noose had been stretched, Burton began to change her story. Now it was not only blacks and a few evil white instigators who were alone rebellious; instead, Burton said, “There were some people with ruffles that were concerned,” that is, members of the elite. With that, the witch-hunt ended, even as many of the 160 blacks were sent to plantations away from New York, even as others were burned alive.
Most of this lies on ground Jill Lepore covers in the superior New York Burning (2005), which offers broader historical context. Still, Johnson brings a storyteller’s sensibility into play, and he makes excellent use of sources and testimonials.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58234-099-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
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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