An inspiring story spanning parts of five centuries as African-Americans pushed back against the powers that be to achieve...
An expansive history of African-Americans in the U.S. military, fighting for fair treatment as they risked their lives at war.
James (Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation, 2010) is a Washington, D.C., lawyer with a deep family military tradition. His grandfather, Cornelius James Sr., served in a racially segregated U.S. Army during World War II, hoping that his sons might serve in a less prejudiced environment. One son became an Army colonel, another became an Army major and a third became a Navy commander. In clear but often flat prose, the author skillfully examines how the Caucasian-dominated military, with a few notable exceptions in the top ranks, treated African-American members as second-class citizens. James shows convincingly that the interplay of African-American status in the military and in civilian life affected one another, for better and for worse. He opens the book with a scene from World War I, then harks back as far as the Revolutionary War to bring the mostly upsetting saga forward. The most important individual of the book, in terms of positive change, is President Harry Truman. Although not by inclination a civil rights activist, on July 26, 1949, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which commanded desegregation within all branches of the armed forces. Positive change proceeded slowly after that. Though it appeared Truman would lose the 1948 presidential election, he won, and after the election, he supported the executive order in vigorous, concrete ways.
An inspiring story spanning parts of five centuries as African-Americans pushed back against the powers that be to achieve more-or-less equal treatment inside the military.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-608-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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