A necessary tarnishing of Camelot’s gleaming image.
JFK, martyred liberal icon, turns out to have been wholly indifferent to the question of civil rights for black Americans.
Kennedy, who built a political career on the sinking of PT-109, once told a fellow survivor, “My story about the collision is getting better all the time. Now I’ve got a Jew and a nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that’s great.” Kennedy may have had Jewish supporters and advisers, but even in the White House, writes historian/journalist Bryant, most of the blacks he encountered were domestic staff. Thus, his brother Bobby, called to press the point that the summer of ’63 was going to be long and hot, told him, “My friends all say the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic.” Kennedy was not so much bigoted—never mind the casual use of the “n” word—as he was opportunistic; he needed the Southern Democrats in order to advance his political ambitions, and while in Congress he played to them so much that throughout the ’50s he was praised in Deep South newspapers as an ally of segregation. The very suggestion seems anathema, but it certainly explains Kennedy’s actions in helping denature the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Shocking, too, is Kennedy’s alliance with white-supremacist politician John Patterson, which led the great baseball player and civil-rights activist Jackie Robinson to voice “his displeasure by refusing to have his photograph taken with Kennedy at a New York dinner.” Kennedy admired Martin Luther King Jr., but mostly for his rhetorical skills; King, in turn, thought Kennedy not a bad man but in need of much guidance. The Birmingham strike of 1963, with Sheriff Bull Connor’s setting attack dogs on black demonstrators, finally turned Kennedy. But before Connor did so, only four percent of Americans thought civil rights was the country’s most urgent issue, while 52 percent thought so afterward.
A necessary tarnishing of Camelot’s gleaming image.Pub Date: June 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-00826-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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