A comprehensive and vividly narrated history, enriched by well-chosen illustrations, that is as much an epic-in-progress as...
From historians in the field, ten essays (a few of them pedestrian in style or leftist in perspective) chronologically detailing the history of African-Americans from their arrival in the New World to the present—a dark story, unfortunately, relieved by a few radiant moments of hope.
In the preface, Kelly and Lewis make some rather sweeping Afrocentric claims (that black labor, for example, helped give birth to capitalism), but—with the exception of the two last essays—the rest of their study offers nuanced commentary and perceptive insights. The first essay, “The First Passage 1502–1617,” details the origins of slavery and reads like a college textbook, but Peter Wood's “Strange New Land 1617–1776” is an elegant and vivid account of the years in which slavery was transformed from a potentially temporary condition to a race-based and increasingly permanent state. The essays offer brief vignettes of the famous—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King—as well as portraits of ordinary men and women (`I had a kind master, but I didn't know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found I could get my freedom, I was very glad,` one former slave observed). Well-chosen facts illustrate the relevant periods and the constantly evolving nature of the black struggle: in Georgia during the Revolutionary War, a third of the slaves took advantage of the British invasion to escape; in New Jersey, slaves were not freed until nearly 30 years after the Declaration of Independence; during the 1930s, Federal intervention caused black illiteracy to drop by ten percent. The last two essays, which cover the recent present, reflect the political bias of Kelly and Lewis and offer a benign take on the Black Panther's attempts at armed insurrection while scanting the achievements of General Colin Powell.
A comprehensive and vividly narrated history, enriched by well-chosen illustrations, that is as much an epic-in-progress as a scholarly record. (color and b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-513945-3
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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