This long-withheld sequel to Black Boy (1945) is an affecting, illuminating register of the evolution of Wright's artistic and political consciousness in the ten-year period just before his first books were published. Written at the same time and scheduled for publication but delayed for obscure reasons, it follows Wright through the crucial years when he first went North to Chicago (1927-36): a series of classic odd jobs as dishwasher, clerk, insurance policy hustler; exposure to influential periodicals and unrestricted library shelves; a brief, disillusioning immersion in the John Reed Club, a knot of factional disputes; and the baffling, painful break with the comrades who challenged his artistic priorities and solemn integrity. The harsh, ragged childhood of Black Boy is never far behind: even after he secured a desirable post office job, the Depression kept him and his family hungry. But Wright focuses on the books that fortified his resolve to write (Proust, Stein, psychology and sociology texts) and the events that intensified his political awareness, especially a dismal episode of latent racism at a writers' congress in New York, the "trial" of an associate who questioned policies, and Wright's own exile by peremptory party members when he refused assignments and withdrew from active participation. Even today, when variations on these themes have become familiar, Wright's version remains both personally revealing and important for its sympathetic but critical portraits of his black fellow travelers, recent migrants with limited visions and no grasp of this new form of exploitation. The first of six unpublished works to be released by the Wright Archive Committee at Yale, this is welcome as a missing piece of the puzzle, valuable as a sequel, and impressive on its own.
Pub Date: May 25, 1977
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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