Fresh eyes and bold, entertaining language combine in this authoritative, essential work of U.S. history.
A vibrant retelling of American history that explodes “the whitewashed mythology enshrined in our collective memory.”
In his simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking debut book, journalist and cultural critic Harriot offers an impressively researched and thoughtful exploration of the African diaspora over the past 500 years. The author weaves humor and wit with history and advocacy, and he takes readers on countless edifying twists and turns that debunk myths or clarify accepted terms and conditions. Harriot is adept at reframing conventional history, showing us how the slave trade was human trafficking, plantations were “forced labor enterprises,” Jim Crow was American apartheid, and lynch mobsters were serial killers and ethnic cleansers. Though pertinent historical names and events come to the forefront, forgotten players and details receive equal attention. “The Emancipation Proclamation couldn’t free the slaves,” he writes. “Black people freed themselves. And in doing so, they defeated the Confederacy and freed America from its most undemocratic institution.” Harriot also injects appropriate modern analogies—e.g., regarding W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, “this beef was bigger than Jay-Z vs. Nas; shadier than Michael Jackson vs. Prince; more contentious than sugar vs. salt in grits.” After noting Ida B. Wells’ “allergy to white nonsense and patriarchy,” the author later devotes an entire chapter to the women who started and contributed to the Civil Rights Movement. In a nod to family, the book is also seasoned with stories from Harriot’s own life and family history, including the “Top-Secret Recipe for Aunt Phyllis’s Fried Chicken.” An uncle even steps in to share some of the narrating duties. Each chapter concludes with an amusing yet informative quiz, and the text includes a wide variety of digressive asides and illuminating sidebar passages—e.g., “The Difference Between Soul Food and Southern Cuisine,” “The Real Wakanda.” Fagbamiye’s illustrations complement the text well.
Fresh eyes and bold, entertaining language combine in this authoritative, essential work of U.S. history.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780358439165
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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