Next book

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

RACE AND REDEMPTION IN THE NEW SOUTH

This eloquent blend of history and advocacy journalism ends with a follow-up on the major figures and with that rarest...

An intimate yet broad presentation of the slow gains made in racial reconciliation in today's South.

Davidson (Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control, 1993, etc.) offers a study of racial tensions in the contemporary South as reflected in the lives and thought of two school board members in Durham, N.C. Ann Atwater was a black civil rights advocate, while C.P. Ellis was, when they first encountered each other, a Ku Klux Klansman. Needless to say, they held deeply polarized positions on race, class, and, specifically, school desegregation. Durham is an appropriate backdrop to the unfolding drama of their confrontation, as it promised much and delivered little to the families of both Atwater and Ellis. The Dukes' tobacco money never filtered though to the poor Ellis family in this "Magic City,'' nor did the capital of "Negro Progress'' make life easier for the Atwaters. Ann's progression out of poverty was painfully slow. To C.P., civil rights legislation seemed part of a plot by blacks and Communists who were, in the words of the Ku Klux Klan, "bent on destroying the white race through economic oppression and intermarriage.'' Davidson skillfully reveals how the rhetoric of the Klan has had such a profound effect on poor whites. It took violent rioting in the wake of the King assassination and a violent confrontation between Ellis and Atwater at a school board meeting to shock C.P. out of his old ways. He realized that the people he had been taught to view as enemies had a just cause. More important, both Atwater and Ellis came to accept that they shared a common struggle against Durham's rich and powerful, a struggle in which they had a greater chance of victory if they worked together.

This eloquent blend of history and advocacy journalism ends with a follow-up on the major figures and with that rarest quality in a book on race in America—a reason for hope.

Pub Date: April 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-19759-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 100


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 100


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Close Quickview