The narrative may be difficult going for general readers, but it’s undeniably enlightening and well worth the effort.
The Bancroft Prize–winning historian pieces together how the Constitution set the stage for Civil War.
The Constitution, notes Wilentz (American History/Princeton Univ.; The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics, 2017), allowed slavery without authorizing it. The framers excluded any mention of “property in men,” slavery’s bedrock principle. That exclusion made slavery a creation of individual states, not a national institution. Since the framers conducted their business secretly, opposite sides could create contrary ipressions from the same phrasing, interpreting the language to suit their purpose. Seeing control as an invasion of property rights, Southern leaders fought against ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the assessment of import taxes, and national abolition. In South Carolina, Charles Pinkney fought for the rights of slaveholders. To overcome fear of a Northern majority, his answer was to have representation based on wealth. Failing that, he proposed a three-fifths rule, whereby slaves were counted as 3/5 of a man. What the Constitution finally passed was a 20-year ban on abolition—a period during which South Carolina and Georgia imported more African slaves than in any other like period—the 3/5 clause, and the fugitive slave clause, protecting a master’s right to reclaim escaped slaves. Those opposed to slavery argued that man’s right to personal liberty should override any property law, and slavery robbed slaves of their right to property in their own persons. When it came to ratifying the Constitution, it wasn’t slavery but rather the division of powers between the state and federal governments that caused many to pause. This astute study of the attempts to create a nation including all the Colonies shows how difficult a task they had. While many condemned slavery, they also knew it could only be abolished gradually. Almost by necessity, Wilentz’s account is occasionally repetitive in order to show how nuanced each argument became as compromises were reached.
The narrative may be difficult going for general readers, but it’s undeniably enlightening and well worth the effort.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-97222-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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