As enlightening as it is entertaining: a worthwhile addition to the field of popular anthropology.
A well-documented and scrupulously researched look at New York City’s two greatest waves of immigration.
Foner (Anthropology/Purchase Coll.) compares and contrasts the experiences of the largely Jewish and Italian immigrants at the turn of the century with those of New York’s current Asian, Latin American, and West Indian newcomers. Whereas only a minuscule amount of earlier immigrants were professionals, today’s represent every class and occupational background—from farmers and factory workers to physicians and engineers. In fact, over half of the Indians, Filipinos, and Taiwanese arriving on our shores today have college degrees (a larger percentage than white New Yorkers have). And whereas earlier immigrants who fled untenable circumstances were often viewed as heroes, today’s undocumented immigrants who have risked all and arrived illegally are often stigmatized and unwanted. Particularly interesting is Foner’s examination of the prejudice faced by members of both waves of immigrants. At the turn of the century, Jews and Italians were viewed as inferior “mongrel” races and, although higher in status than African-Americans or Asians, were deemed to be racial pollutants. Prominent social scientists wrote about the Jews’ innate love of money and the Italians’ inborn instability. Today it’s the darker-skinned immigrants—both West Indians and dark-skinned Latinos—who confront the most bias. Intent on shattering romantic, idealized stereotypes of earlier immigrants (whom she refers to as “folk heroes of a sort”), Foner consistently challenges the misconceptions that make the current immigrants suffer by comparison. Among these are the alleged educational successes of early immigrants, particularly Jews; in fact, during the early 1900s, few Jews attended high school and even fewer graduated. Less than one percent ever reached the first year of college. And while earlier immigrants were shamefully coerced into adopting American ways, today’s attend schools where their culture is celebrated as an element of a multicultural curriculum.
As enlightening as it is entertaining: a worthwhile addition to the field of popular anthropology.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08226-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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