King’s analysis of social issues, as delineated in Laurent’s useful reappraisal, seems as relevant today.
In her debut book, Laurent (American Studies/Paris Institute of Political Studies) draws on extensive research into Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings, speeches, and papers as well as archival and published sources to make a strong argument that his campaign for social justice went beyond race to encompass broad, transformative social and economic changes for all poor Americans.
As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out in the foreword, historians and civil rights activists, deeming King’s Poor People’s Campaign a failure, “have failed to capture the import of King’s reframing of the civil rights movement in economic and redistributive terms.” Laurent takes her title from Michael Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America, which incited a renewed concern for poverty among social scientists, economists, and politicians, including President John F. Kennedy. In 1967, King gave two sermons titled “The Other America” and asked Harrington to write the blueprint for the Poor People’s Campaign. Laurent emphasizes the historical and intellectual underpinnings for King’s thoughts about poverty, particularly Frederick Douglass, “who ushered in a tradition of black radical thought dedicated to the idea of substantive justice,” and W.E.B. Du Bois, who believed that racial equality could not be achieved without social and economic equality. Among King’s contemporaries, Laurent cites John Kenneth Galbraith and Gunnar Myrdal as strong influences. “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” He called for “broad structural reforms, addressing joblessness and lack of public resources in the American ghetto.” Among those resources were adequate housing, public mass transit (to help poor people get to jobs outside of the inner city), and education. Laurent praises King—a bit too repetitively—for his “clairvoyant analyses,” prescient intuition, and insights that were echoed by later economists and social scientists—and by current reformers calling for “a Marshall Plan for American’s poor.”
King’s analysis of social issues, as delineated in Laurent’s useful reappraisal, seems as relevant today.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-520-28857-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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