More journalistic guide than history, the book provides a satisfying antidote to average readers’ disturbing ignorance of...
An earnest, informative companion to the PBS series on the largest and fastest-growing minority in the United States: Latinos, now numbering more than 50 million.
Journalist and PBS commentator Suarez (The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, 2006) notes that, among nations, only Mexico contains more Hispanics than the U.S. “At some point in the 2040s,” writes the author, “a slim majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to people who arrived in this country from someplace other than Europe.” Beginning in the 17th century, Suarez reminds readers that when Englishmen arrived at Massachusetts and Virginia to settle or look for riches while despoiling and killing Indians, Spaniards and colonists from Mexico had been doing the same for 50 years in Florida and the Southwest. After a review of Spanish New World exploration and capsule histories of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico that emphasize their usually painful relations to the U.S., Suarez concentrates on America’s Latino legacy from the 19th century to the present. Two themes predominate: racism and immigration. Although not as murderous as that against blacks, discrimination against Latinos has an equally long and troubled history that turns out to be no less true for white America’s fear of being overwhelmed with Hispanics pouring across our border. True to TV documentary format, Suarez includes the story of an individual with every section. Few will be familiar, yet many should be—e.g., José Martí, the hero of Cuban independence, or Juan de Oñate, founder of the first white settlement in the Southwest. Matters improve greatly as the author approaches the present day and points with pride to famous Latinos from Desi Arnez to Albert Pujols.
More journalistic guide than history, the book provides a satisfying antidote to average readers’ disturbing ignorance of America’s Hispanic heritage.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-23814-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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