An essential guide to forces shaping our nation and the 2016 presidential election.
Journalist and Nation Institute fellow Jaffe debuts with an in-depth account of the wave of populist anger driving “a new era of protest and activism” in the United States.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans have sought to wrest control of their lives through political movements like the tea party and Occupy. “For the people taking part in them,” writes the author, “it is not a question of left or right, but of the powerless against the powerful.” United in their anger at wealthy elites and both major political parties, people in economic distress have been protesting and striking over issues from the minimum wage and labor bargaining to home foreclosures and student debt (more than $35,000 for the average student in 2015). Through richly detailed reporting, including more than 100 interviews, Jaffe shows how protest movements over these and other issues (including racism and immigration reform) have grown into a larger fusion movement in which activists have recognized the connections among such disparate arenas as the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, and immigration reform. She illustrates the intersections for individuals like Ivanna Gonzalez, a Moral Monday protester in North Carolina, who realizes, “being a woman, a student, an immigrant, and a worker were all parts of her life.” Even as students go into debt to earn college degrees, notes Jaffe, many are likely to end up in the service industry, where the median annual income is $20,000. Her insights offer a new context for understanding seemingly random events—such as Wal-Mart strikes, student debt strikes, and the Chicago teachers’ strike—and the strong sense of solidarity underlying them. She suggests many participants discovered shared concerns when brought together in occupied spaces of the Occupy movement. Her book even makes sense of protests that have linked the tea party in partnership with the teamsters and the NAACP.
An essential guide to forces shaping our nation and the 2016 presidential election.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-536-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
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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