An engrossing history of an obscure incident: the 1823 mass uprising of slaves in the South American British colony of Demerara (present-day Guyana). Da Costa (History/Yale) draws on ample primary sources- -diaries, plantation records, letters, and records of legal proceedings, including complaints of the slaves themselves—to draw a riveting picture of the Demerara colony: Approximately 5,000 free people, half white and half black, lived among 77,000 slaves who worked the colony's 60 plantations. On August 17, 1823, 9,000- 12,000 slaves, inspired by the recent French, American, and Haitian revolutions, surrounded plantation houses throughout the colony, smashing windows, menacing masters and overseers, and seizing weapons. The uprising provoked a savage reaction from colonial authorities: In over three days of fighting, more than 255 slaves were killed, while during the few days the slaves held power only three whites were slain. Da Costa views the crisis from multiple viewpoints (of course, accounts by whites dominate the record): Planters who defended the colony's inhumane economic system blamed English missionaries for fueling the rebellion, while the missionaries, who decried the slave system, condemned the oppressiveness of the masters. Da Costa describes the career and political trial of John Smith, a missionary who defended and identified with the slaves: Smith was condemned to death for inciting the rebellion, then died in prison while his appeal for clemency was pending. In the end, while Parliament declined to censure the Demerara authorities, the rebellion and the excesses of the planters ``gave a boost to the abolitionist movement'' and hastened the end of slavery in Demerara and elsewhere in the empire. A first-rate account of a little-known episode that had large consequences for Britain and for the world: careful, professional scholarship married to a well-told story.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508298-2
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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