Occasionally disjointed, but readers will quite likely be both charmed and educated by these dedicated, candid, brilliant...
Two generations of civil-rights insights from an activist in her 60s and her daughter, a newspaper reporter turned novelist (The Living Blood, 2001, etc.).
Eschewing the broad-brush approach of many civil-rights memoirs—high-profile marches, mass arrests, White House signings, etc.—the Dues favor a narrative technique more akin to pointillism. In 33 alternating chapters, mother and daughter explain how each became involved in behind-the-scenes organizing, as well as occasional high-profile encounters. Patricia honed her awareness of racial injustice in rural Florida, where the substandard Negro schools she attended could not stunt her inquiring mind. In high school, outraged by the principal’s lackadaisical attitude about quality education, she tried to get him removed by launching a petition drive, a tactic she had learned about from her stepfather, a civics teacher, and her mother, a voter-registration activist. By the time she entered Florida A&M University, Patricia was deeply involved in civil-rights activism, as was her equally brainy and committed sister Priscilla; together they faced jail time and beatings by police. Patricia and her husband, a civil-rights lawyer, passed this crusading spirit to their daughter, Tananarive. By the time she came of age, some civil-rights battles had been won in the courts, but she knew she would have to combat racism on an individual basis every day. The book is filled with mini-portraits of the obscure as well as the famous (Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, et al.). The authors quickly identify almost every character by race, giving credit where credit is due to blacks and whites alike—as well as parceling out blame where blame is due to blacks and whites alike. They don’t adhere to a linear chronology, which can be confusing, and the alternating chapters don’t always mesh smoothly. But the anecdotes, based on family letters, school papers, and other closely held memorabilia, are unmatched in other accounts.
Occasionally disjointed, but readers will quite likely be both charmed and educated by these dedicated, candid, brilliant women.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44733-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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