Sure to interest students of ethnic relations, history and anthropology, with pointed examples for daily living in this...
A provocative look at the white race—or, more accurately, the white races—by noted African-American scholar Painter (Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present, 2005, etc.).
The notion of race is illusory and elusive, yet it has been a topic on the minds of many people since…well, mostly not that long ago, though the author traces the encounters of African, Greek, Scythian and Celt far into the past, sometimes getting a little out of her element. It is not quite accurate, for instance, to say of the Celtic tribes that we “cannot know what those people called themselves,” for their names are plentiful, and words such as xanthos suggest that the Greeks were well aware of “color” differences among people. Still, Painter makes the useful point that constructions of race and whiteness, though drawing on distant roots and ancient tropes of enslaver and enslaved, are relatively recent developments. Also, she notes that, during the last few centuries, there have been visible notions of degrees of whiteness—with Irish immigrants, for example, excluded from membership in white America—as well as a concept of expanding whiteness—those Irish were eventually admitted to the ranks once the Eastern Europeans came along. There are even different types of whiteness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes the author, pondered regional differences with respect to his fellow Northerners, “a smarter but weaker ‘race’ than southerners.” Occasionally Painter’s argument relies on mere assertion: “White race chauvinists are loath to admit that brown-skinned people speak the English language fluently.” At such turns, an example or two would help. Nonetheless, the author, who has devoured shelves of books in the American history stacks, makes a significant point. Though we have mapped the human genome and discovered how closely related all the peoples of Earth are, “the fundamental black white binary endures, even though the category of whiteness—or might we say more precisely, a category of nonblackness—effectively expands.”
Sure to interest students of ethnic relations, history and anthropology, with pointed examples for daily living in this multicultural, multiethnic land.Pub Date: March 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-04934-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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