A significant work of social history bound to please serious readers and scholars.
The story of more than 55 million people who succumbed to “America fever” and emigrated from Eastern Europe in the century before World War II.
In this unusually penetrating view of “one of the greatest migrations in human history,” MacArthur fellow Zahra (Modern European History/Univ. of Chicago; The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II, 2011, etc.) analyzes the complex motives that drove the behaviors of migrants and nations during years (1846-1940) of tumultuous human movement. Individuals, facing economic and other pressures at home, wrestled with the conflicting advice of earlier migrants: “There is happiness here,” said a Detroit letter writer in 1891; others cautioned friends in the old country to stay home. Indeed, many disappointed migrants found that their “greatest hope was to return home.” Meanwhile, Eastern European officials linked westward emigration to “slavery, exploitation, and moral ruin,” seeking to retain the most desirable citizens as workers and conscripts while encouraging ethnic and religious minorities to leave. European governments’ manipulation of emigration extended to creating colonies of settlers in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere and maintaining state-sponsored boardinghouses in major U.S. cities, all aimed at reinforcing attachment to home countries. At the same time, European states arrested and tried travel agents accused of seducing migrants into leaving for America. Writing with an ease and authority borne of a mastery of her material, Zahra uncovers the common threads that characterized these migrations from the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the Depression, world wars, and refugee crises. Using letters, diaries, and the work of authors from Joseph Roth to Louis Adamic, Zahra brings to life the sometimes-shattering effects of migration on marriages and families. Her reflections on the meaning of freedom, as well as the conflict between the individual’s right to move and the well-being of his or her homeland, add greatly to the richness of this account.
A significant work of social history bound to please serious readers and scholars.Pub Date: March 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-07801-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
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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