Raises more questions than it answers about a courageous man.
Correspondence on social issues to and from the former Brooklyn Dodger who broke the race barrier in major league baseball.
Editor Long (Religious Studies/Elizabethtown College; God and Country?: Diverse Perspectives on Christianity and Patriotism, 2007, etc.) discovered the core of this collection while researching Richard Nixon, a frequent Robinson correspondent. Believing he’d found something significant, Long rounded up other letters from elsewhere and assembled this affectionate assortment, which reveals as much about Robinson and his correspondents as it does about the United States in the period it spans (1946–1972). Robinson knew racial bigotry intimately and had suffered for it grievously, but as he left baseball and moved into a political world percolating with racial turmoil, he found himself initially attracted to the GOP, particularly as exemplified by Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. Their exchanges tend to be made with one eye on the history books. In March 1957, for example, Nixon wrote, “It is a privilege to be working along with someone like yourself to achieve the important objective of guaranteed equal opportunity for all Americans.” At first, Robinson mistrusted both John and Robert Kennedy (oddly, nothing appears here about their assassinations); he later warmed to both, however, as he cooled toward Nixon and Rockefeller. He generally supported the war in Vietnam, where his son was wounded in action, and wrote a long letter chiding Martin Luther King Jr. for his anti-war position. Robinson had a fragile, uneasy relationship with King, but it was cordial compared to his interactions with NAACP head Roy Wilkins and fire-breathing radical Malcolm X. It’s disturbing to read unctuous letters from white politicos panting for black votes and trying to co-opt Robinson—troubling, too, to realize that many of the baseball hero’s letters and virtually all of his syndicated newspaper columns (some reproduced here) were ghostwritten.
Raises more questions than it answers about a courageous man.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8710-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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