• The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth *** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    Scott Ellsworth answers a question I’ve pondered ever since I first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. How come I had never heard of it before? Beginning the day after the flames died out, white Tulsans did everything they could to bury the evidence. Police gathered up photographs and hid them. Government investigations and after-action reports from the National Guard vanished. Bodies of the dead were buried in unmarked mass graves. Newspaper accounts were cut and taken out of library archives. By tacit agreement, white Tulsans refused to discuss it. Black survivors, like Holocaust survivors after them, were too traumatized to tell their children.

    Before the 9/11 attacks, the Tulsa race massacre of African Americans by a vigilante white mob was the worst attack on Americans in the country’s history (only if you overlook the decimation of Native American populations.)

    Ellsworth, is a white, very professional historian, opens the book with an impartial account of events based on credible evidence. His description is in contrast to white apologists who insist that deaths were minimal and roughly equal between Blacks and whites. Angry African Americans suggest that the invasion of the Greenwood District of Tusla was a pre-meditated land grab. Ellsworth lays out what can be said with certainty based on surviving testimonies and documents.

    The events were perpetrated by a riled up mob that ran out of control. Think about January 6 and the U.S. Capitol and shudder.

    Much of the book is dedicated to Ellsworth’s tireless search for mass graves of murdered African Americans purportedly dumped right after the riot. For more than two decades, Ellsworth scoured stories and archives, cajoled governments, and sought assistance from archaeologists to help him search and eventually dig through potential locations. Ellsworth is a strong proponent of the idea of paying reparations to the offspring of families whose lives and livelihoods were snuffed out by an unapologetic white Tulsa.

    His contribution was to find the bodies of some of those who had been disappeared so their remains could be returned and reburied with dignity. His other contribution was to write this book.

    The first person was identified on July 12, 2024, following the exhumation of African Americans from a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-massacre-oklahoma-mass-grave-cl-daniel-rcna161599

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  • Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah **** (of 4)

    August 7, 2024

    Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx are two of the greatest all-star fighters in history. Each woman has risen through the ranks of prisoners competing for their freedom. They have signed contracts to be contestants in for-profit showdowns arranged for regular broadcasts. Fans wear uniforms with their idol’s names. They follow every social media posting and watch special profiles of their heroes. They send fan mail and scream their heads off during matches. They weep over losses and glumly trudge to work when their heroes fail them. Televised fighting matches end when an opponent is killed.

    Adjei-Brenyah holds tight reins on prose that indicts America’s system of incarceration and its failed acts of correction. He brings to light a system that overwhelmingly and disproportionately jails people of color. He never excuses criminal behavior, but also clarifies that solitary confinement, tasing, and beatings by guards does not repair broken individuals, nor do the slightest toward preventing future crimes. He does it all by humanizing all-star fighters like Loretta and Hurricane who are dehumanized by their required acquiescence to their guards every request and who must live every moment under watch.

    Chain Gang is also an indictment of American football without once mentioning the sport. America’s most popular sport is akin to gladiatorial combat in Ancient Rome’s coliseum. A majority of players are black. All will be injured. Many will suffer irreversible brain injury and die early. The harder they hit one another the louder we scream in ecstasy. Chain Gang is an important read.

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  • Surprise, Kill, Vanish by Annie Jacobsen *** (of 4)

    August 7, 2024

    Not as groundbreaking as her first book, Area 51, Surprise, Kill, Vanish is a highlight reel of the CIA’s known exploits and failures. Beginning with its birth following the dismemberment of the OSS, the CIA’s job has been to proceed when the President’s first two foreign policy options prove ineffective: diplomacy and war. Working clandestinely, and with the goal of preserving “plausible deniability” for the President, the agency is tasked with manipulating foreign governments and leaders. Manipulating serving as one of a variety of codes that include assassination.

    Jacobsen pokes at these questions with stories of covert CIA actions in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, Cuba, and Afghanistan. She does not do much with interventions in Africa and the ongoing War on Terror is probably still more classified than available.

    Jacobsen raises important philosophical questions about the rectitude of proper warfare. Is it acceptable to kill a Taliban warlord with a cruise missile, but not a knife to the throat? Is a drone strike that kills a future terrorist an act of prevention or an act of murder? In a world of small-state and non-state actors who do not hesitate to assassinate enemies with sneak attacks (heck, even Putin’s secret services attack its enemies of the state while they reside in foreign countries), is it inappropriate for Americans to play the same game?

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  • Goodnight Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea **** (of 4)

    July 25, 2024

    Based on accounts from the author’s mother, Luis Alberto Urrea has created a fictional account of two young women who volunteer for the Red Cross in WW II. They are assigned to trucks outfitted to make donuts and sent off to the war. The two women serve GIs a taste of home: fresh donuts, hot coffee, and some healthy flirting with young female servers. As one commander says about his soldiers fighting Nazis from the beaches of Normandy toward Germany, “My soldiers know who they are fighting against, but the Donut Dollies (“STOP calling me, Dolly!” is recurring refrain) is reminder of what they are fighting for.”

    The idea of serving fresh donuts to raise the morale of troops, in hindsight, feels as quaint as a Bob Hope variety show. Urrea has set himself a difficult task of justifying another book about World War II, this one about donuts. He succeeds marvelously by painting a rich picture of Irene Woodward, a scion of New York socialites, and Dorothy Dunford, a strapping midwestern farm girl, as they descend into the dangers of wartime duties. Irene and Dorothy ask themselves repeatedly, “Is serving donuts really helping to win the war? What are we doing here?” It all matters. Keeping up morale is as important as supplying ammunition or shipping the right number of warm socks in the right sizes to soldiers on the front lines.

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  • Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley *** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    Joe King Oliver is, no, was, a NYC cop. He was sent to Rikers after being framed for molesting a perp. Now, a dozen years later, still suffering flashbacks and PTSD from his time in the hole, he is trying to put his life back together. He is working as a private investigator when a client asks him to take on the case of a cop-killer on death row. Cop-killers don’t get let off, especially those who admit to doing the shooting. Except, the man on death row is an African American who worked hard to lift up NYC’s most down and out. Now calling himself A Free Man (formerly Leonard Compton), A Free Man ran up against a crooked ring of police who were extorting junkies and prostitutes. The cops hunted down our do-gooders associates and came after A Free Man, guns blazing.

    Joe Oliver now has two cases involving unknown crooked cops: A Free Man and his own hunt for the guys who framed him. He prowls the streets of the city expounding the philosophy of a well-read, self-taught, working class Black man making him one of the most interesting characters to ever interrogate the line between right and wrong. Race and class are given the attention they deserve. New Yorkers, who are honest with themselves, are always measuring and assessing. At times the circuities of Oliver’s attempts to uncover the bad cops who framed him and the bad cops that went after A Free Man are too tangled to follow, but stick with Oliver. His observational skills about life in the city, and about life in general, are magnificent.

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  • Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen *** (of 4)

    June 26, 2024

    This is Annie Jacobsen’s first book in a series of investigative journalism pieces into top-secret practices of the U.S. government. Using the Freedom of Information Act, access to unclassified documents, and interviews with old-timers willing to talk on the record, Jacobsen does her best to describe goings-on at Area 51. Located in the Nevada desert, its existence is not acknowledged by the government nor is it located on maps. It is adjacent to Nevada’s nuclear testing sites, but entrance by land or air is only permitted to those with top level security clearances.

    According to Jacobsen, Area 51 was created soon after the Manhattan Project at the end of WW II. It has been used by the CIA, the Air Force, and other military operations. Nuclear weapons have been developed and tested. Spy aircraft like the U-2, Stealth airplanes that could avoid radar, drones, and planes capable of flying faster than Mach 3 were part of Cold War competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were operational for decades before the public came to know of them and have been in use in conflict zones around the world. Radiation tests were probably performed on human subjects without their consent to determine the impact of nuclear fallout and the use of dirty bombs.

    Jacobsen, strongly implies, that far more nefarious activities have been undertaken–actions so uncomfortable that they are protected against Freedom of Information inquiries. Some secret actions were so clandestine they were kept from Presidents. Jacobsen makes you wonder about the power of democracies to administer their militaries. She also makes you ponder what secret tests are underway today, tests we won’t know about for decades.

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  • The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto *** (of 4)

    May 18, 2024

    Shorto’s hypothesis is concise and convincing. His book is long and detailed. As the ages of Enlightenment and Exploration dawned on Europe, Holland was the most wide open and accepting of all the European powers in the 1500s. It was home to the most progressive artists, scientists, and philosophers. It welcomed traders from around the globe and in sharp contrast to its European competitors–Spain and Great Britain–it opened its doors to foreigners. Spain tossed out Jews and Muslims, many of whom found safety in the Netherlands. England was fighting wars over religion leaving even fundamentalist Christians who felt England was not religious enough to find sanctuary in Leiden, Holland.

    As the oceanic powers sent “explorers” to conquer territories around the world, Holland settled New Amsterdam. Its central holdings were in Manhattan and up the Hudson River to present day Albany. Henry Hudson, a Britisher, who also claimed Hudson’s Bay and surrounding territory in Canada, was actually hired by the Dutch to be their explorer.

    Those religious fundamentalists from Great Britain left Leiden because they found Holland to be too liberal for their tastes. They became the Puritan settlers of New England. To this day, suggests Shorto, New York City, formerly New Amsterdam, has maintained its Dutch character: accepting, entrepreneurial, and a haven for all immigrants and faiths.

    Among the fine points raised by Shorto’s research is his careful assessment of relations between Dutch settlers and Native Americans. By his accounting the Indians were genetically speaking, 99.99% identical to their European counterparts. Which is to say they were smart, pleasant, calculating, jealous, envious, devious, intellectual, mechanical, curious, political, and so on. The story of the Dutch selling Manhattan to Indians for $24 proves not only laughably false, but also a fabrication contrived by English historians, who as victors in the New World, got to write the continent’s history.

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  • The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta **** (of 4)

    April 25, 2024

    Tim Alberta is a Christian evangelical and an accomplished journalist describing what he sees as a growing division inside America’s evangelical churches. He visits and describes events within congregations of numerous mega-churches across the country. A vocal minority (he describes them as a minority, but I’m not sure anyone is counting) of right-wing nationalists have transferred their faith from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump. They are led by like-minded Republicans and by pastors praying for their presidential protector of beleaguered and oppressed Christians in America.

    Alberta does not challenge evangelism’s core conservative principles: opposition to abortion, anti-LGBQTIA+ sentiments, Christianity’s promise of a heavenly Kingdom to come, and the necessity of bringing the word of Christ to unbelievers. But he is unstinting in his questioning of how personal conservative beliefs have become militant rallying cries that, in his words, violate the spirit of Christ.

    Yet he wonders, how have Christ’s teachings to love your enemies, to welcome the stranger, and to care for the downtrodden turned into a winner-take-all political battle? Why have evangelicals been among the country’s leaders in turning away immigrants, trolling public health advocates promoting Covid vaccines, and on the front lines of the January 6th uprising?

    Enthusiastic supporters greet Donald Trump at a rally of more than 30,000 in Mobile, Ala., in August.

    The book suggests that the problem is misguided spirituality and he does his best to quote scripture back at those he perceives to be fanatics. But he also describes a movement that is constructed to absorb what it is told on faith. So when congregants get all of their information from charismatic preachers and an endless supply of right-wing, and deeply conspiratorial news sources — Covid was created by cabals to control churches; elections are fixed by “woke” Democrats and the Deep State — there is not much congregational initiative to question.

    Alberta points an enraged finger at the Falwells, the Moral Majority, Liberty University, The Southern Baptist Convention, scores of preachers who have sexually abused their congregants, and hucksters who raised millions of dollars preaching hatred to evangelicals terrified that they are losing their God-anointed Christian country.

    Near the end of his book, he does his best to point to a resurgence of what he considers sane-minded evangelical Christians. He predicts a forthcoming split of nationalistic churches from those who are Jesus-centered. A schism is the most optimistic outcome he can point to.

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  • Rough Crossings by Simon Schama *** (of 4)

    March 25, 2024

    How did we not know this?

    In the 1760s, a court case in England suggested that any person of African descent living in Great Britain was a free man. Enslaved Africans in America knew about the court ruling. Moreover, they were well aware that Jefferson’s paragraph in the Declaration of Independence had been deleted. Jefferson, though a slave-owner himself, recognized that the hypocrisy of a declaration calling for freedom, equality, and the removal of the tyranny by unjust overseers could not be squared with the maintenance of American slavery. The Declaration of Independence would not be ratified by southern states so long as Jefferson’s paragraph endured and the issue of slavery was postponed until a later date.

    Nonetheless, enslaved Blacks reasoned that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. By the thousands, African Americans fled to British lines, and many Blacks fought against Americans. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of all enslaved Africans escaped plantations, only to find they had backed the losing side.

    After the war, as southerners sought to reclaim their lost “property,” Blacks did their utmost to make their way to Great Britain. Three thousand Blacks, for example, were in New York City at war’s end, under the protection of British troops.

    Thousands of Blacks moved to Nova Scotia, because it was part of Great Britain. (Check out the link, Our History-Black Migration in Nova Scotia.) They were promised land, but promises were broken. In 1792, 1,192 men, women, and children sailed out of Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone to start a free Black nation on the African shores from which many families had begun their journey. In one poignant early election in Sierra Leone, community representatives were voted on by men and women of the newfound village. Which means the first women in history to ever vote were formerly enslaved Africans.

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  • Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley (*** of 4)

    March 25, 2024

    Kerry Howley digs deep into the lives of American whistleblowers: John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, and Edward Snowden. Each was charged with violating national security laws and faced the full force of an American law enforcement system designed to shut down all security risks. Howley argues that the laws were established hastily while the dust was still smoldering at the World Trade Center. The laws have enabled waterboarding, torture, secret detention camps, Guantanamo, solitary confinement, psychological torment, and imprisonment without representation or trial. They also permit America’s spy agencies to track our phone calls. Agreements we’ve made with Facebook and Google, for example, mean we have traded away a good deal of our privacy. Online collectors gather our interests and our visitations in order to promote the next advertisement to appear in our feed: someone is making a profit by monetizing us.

    On one side of the argument the world is a dangerous place. Non-state actors and secretive emissaries of hostile governments are working around the clock to destabilize America. Only constant and unrelenting vigilance can protect us. On the other side, argues Howley, at least some of the Americans she highlights were neither malicious nor dangerous. Their treatment by the American government is very far from upholding America’s values.

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