A vital book for anyone who wishes to understand American race relations past and present.
An ambitious chronicle of a racially motivated atrocity that still resonates today.
Veteran Tulsa-based journalist Luckerson, a former staff writer at the Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine, brings his considerable journalistic sensibilities to this sweeping and intimate portrait of racial violence, empowerment, and social action. The author’s subject in his debut is the 1921 race massacre in the entrepreneurial Greenwood district of Tulsa, an area popularly known as "Black Wall Street." Luckerson's exhaustive research and interviewing yield an evocative tale related through the sagas of several prominent Greenwood families and massacre survivors—most notably, the Goodwin family, the longest-surviving Greenwood family and caretakers of the invaluable newspaper the Oklahoma Eagle, which becomes another character in the story. Luckerson's well-documented history of the arrivals, struggles, and triumphs of Black Tulsa prior to the massacre is invaluable, particularly his accounts of the development and promise of Tulsa as a whole and of Greenwood's phoenixlike emergence from the ashes. His depiction of the massacre itself is not for the faint of heart, but it’s necessary reading nonetheless. “When he stops to reflect on the magnitude of the destruction, and the dark motivation at the heart of it, he thinks pogrom—an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group—may be the most apt description,” writes Luckerson about a member of the Goodwin family. The details of the violence, mass graves, and sea of Red Cross tents that resembled a military field hospital necessarily reinforce the horror. Luckerson adeptly describes the centurylong economic, political, and psychological consequences of the massacre, and he clearly demonstrates how those consequences inform contemporary debates in Tulsa, the Oklahoma state legislature, and the nation concerning restitution, police brutality and accountability, and the social responsibility of citizens and businesses, Black and White alike. Pair this excellent history with RJ Young’s history/memoir hybrid, Requiem for the Massacre.
A vital book for anyone who wishes to understand American race relations past and present.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593134375
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2023
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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