A hallmark, essential to an understanding of the civil-rights movement, Dr. King and 20th-century America.
Branch closes his monumental trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. with gravity and grace.
By 1965, scarcely a decade after he had begun working for it, King had become the voice and face of the civil-rights struggle. Yet, writes Branch, in that year, King, who was arrested and beaten by southern deputies in Selma, Ala., where the movement saw perhaps its finest hour, “willed himself from the pinnacle of acclaim straight to ‘the valley’ of a new campaign to seek voting rights for black people.” King’s leadership was remarkable for many reasons, including his insistence on nonviolence, following the model of Mahatma Gandhi. That insistence would isolate King from other black leaders, and he “would grow ever more lonely in his conviction that the [nonviolent] movement offered superior leadership discipline for the whole country” in a time of rapidly escalating violence at home and abroad. King’s tragic counterpart in these years would be Lyndon Johnson, whose efforts to move the promises of the Voting Rights Act and Great Society programs forward ground to a halt in the mud and blood of Vietnam; so weary was the Cabinet, warned one White House counselor, that “they are beyond asking the hard questions now.” The hard questions were coming from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, who had made a special project of King; under Hoover’s direction, FBI agents “were scrambling to fashion a more productive line of attack on him” than that of the pre-Selma days, attempting to recast him as a philandering communist, and possibly an embezzler besides. The ploy did not work, but King faced an array of enemies. As Branch writes at the close of this always moving book, King foresaw that, delivering his famed Promised Land speech with its “thunderclap ending of little more than one hundred words” only hours before being assassinated in Memphis.
A hallmark, essential to an understanding of the civil-rights movement, Dr. King and 20th-century America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-684-85712-X
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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