Robinson eloquently urges the white world to accord the constitutions and laws of black countries the same sanctity it...
A fiery, disorganized and somewhat repetitive exposé of longstanding injustices toward Haiti perpetrated by a long list of colonial powers including France and, most recently, the United States.
On Feb. 29, 2004, an American convoy escorted twice-elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince and removed him for good from his country. Did he resign, as the official U.S. version maintains, or was he rather deposed by an American-backed coup d’état? Robinson (The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe Each Other, 2002, etc.) vehemently lays out evidence of a coup. Haiti has long been isolated and resented by the Caribbean’s colonial powers. Thanks to the military genius of former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture, the French colony known as Saint-Domingue staged the only successful slave revolt in the Americas in 1803 and became an independent nation, expelling its brutal French masters and ending Napoleon’s dreams of world empire. The United States, France and other powers (including the Vatican) punished Haiti with embargos and crushing reparations that had devastating consequences for decades to come. Dictators such as the Duvaliers were puppets of American business interests, while former priest Aristide, elected democratically in 1990, enacted social reforms that helped level discrepancies between rich and poor and destroy the status quo. Hence, Robinson asserts, American resentment against Haiti’s intransigence is deeply rooted; Haitians are considered proud and “unmanipulable.” The Bush administration helped destabilize the government by arming Duvalierist rebels led by Guy Philippe, a CIA-trained former police precinct captain, to threaten order and bring down Aristide. Robinson’s Christ-like portrait of Aristide is a bit over-the-top, and his single-note argument is rather erratically presented. It is nonetheless deeply persuasive, as brisk chapters move urgently between past and present.
Robinson eloquently urges the white world to accord the constitutions and laws of black countries the same sanctity it accords its own.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-465-07050-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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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