A well-fleshed-out biography featuring an appropriate amount of historical context.
A biography of an important 20th-century activist who was one of the first to stand up to “the well-publicized injustices of the Third Reich.”
The subject of Duffy’s (Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring, 2014, etc.) latest is Bill Bailey (1915-1995), a merchant seaman with little formal education who joined the American Communist Party as a teenager and became increasingly angry about the U.S. government appeasing Hitler during his rise to power and subsequent comprehensive repression of any form of dissent. Bailey’s fleeting fame occurred when he and a few like-minded Nazi haters boarded the Bremen, “the flagship of Hitler’s commercial armada,” in New York Harbor in 1935. A dress-up party was in progress to celebrate the departure of the massive ship. Bailey and his colleagues had devised a plan to scale the mast and remove the Nazi flag, which featured a swastika. The plan succeeded, becoming “the first blow landed against the Third Reich by foreign adversaries, delivered without guns or bomb, years before America, or any country, chose to take military action against a regime that was already signaling its treacherous intentions.” However, local authorities, feeling duty-bound to protect a foreign vessel against politically oriented trespassers, arrested Bailey and a few accomplices. Throughout the narrative, Duffy offers detailed sections about the Bremen and its impressive luxury, the duties of merchant mariners, the American Communist Party, Hitler’s rise, the German persecution of Jews, and the failure of most Americans—including President Franklin Roosevelt—to counteract the evils of Nazism in the early 1930s. In addition, the author critiques the criminal justice system as he provides detailed coverage of the trial that resulted in the acquittals of Bailey and his colleagues. After the acquittal, Bailey remained a political activist, union organizer, and merchant mariner, serving in World War II. For the last few decades of his life, he remained out of the spotlight.
A well-fleshed-out biography featuring an appropriate amount of historical context.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6231-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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