Lively and judicious critiques of American historians and their work.
Peering into the past for a “mirror of the future.”
Foner, a distinguished historian, offers trenchant reflections on slavery and its legacy—and how they bear on the current crisis of American democracy. In this collection of almost 60 book reviews and opinion pieces, he examines the work of his colleagues and reflects on what he calls his major preoccupations: slavery and antislavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. The book devotes a section to each concern, then adds one more on general topics in American history and another on notable historians and the role of history in public life. Intended for general audiences, these clear, polished, and discerning essays originally appeared in major newspapers and journals of opinion, mostly on the left, beginning in the early 1990s. Taken as a whole, they support Foner’s claim that American civil liberties, whose breach affected his family during his youth, are more fragile than most of us imagine. Slavery was the ultimate violation of that ideal, and Foner notes that no part of U.S. history has been studied more intensively or outstandingly during his lifetime. Yet he maintains that his profession’s preoccupation with slavery stands in stark contrast to the national desire to forget it. He also connects his most persistent concerns with “the current crisis of American democracy, reflected in intense political polarization, the weaponization of base prejudice, and refusal to accept the outcomes of elections. This situation is not unprecedented. American democracy has always been a terrain of conflict.” Foner’s body of work reminds us that freedom, that elusive ideal, has long been contested: sometimes bitterly, sometimes brutally, but never decisively.
Lively and judicious critiques of American historians and their work.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781324110613
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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