Book Description
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.
It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality.
Finding racism hidden within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.
Customer Reviews:
A Work of Great Relevance and Urgency..........2004-06-05
In its simplest rendition, Black Is a Country is a work of hope that holds the potential to guide us out of our current state of racial dilemmas. Nikhil Singh points to the futility of relying on U.S. nationalist traditions in dismantling racism by illuminating the dialectic of race and nation, two concepts that have always been ineluctably intertwined, yet have largely remained fixed at opposite ends of the spectrum. Black intellectuals throughout the "long civil rights era" had articulated a vision of democracy that stretches beyond the parameters of American nationalism, and by doing so, they pointed to the failures of American universalism by shining light on the contradictions between American claims of universal democracy and the realities of systemic racial oppression. Recalling these bold visions and radical conceptions of democracy from the past, Singh ultimately suggests, will potentially lead us once again to "an effective antiracism" (14).
In framing his argument, Singh re-envisions a "long civil rights era" that defies the "King-centric" and universalist version that remains engraved in the annals of American history. This new framework accomplishes four things. First, it suggests that civil rights made up only one part of a much broader and expansive struggle. As Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized toward the end of his life, "justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from the fountains of political oratory" (13). Second, rather than emphasizing the March on Washington or the passage of the Civil Rights Act-two landmark occurrences that reinscribed the notion of American universalism-as the apex of the movement, it centers the formation and expansion of the black public sphere as the movement's most phenomenal achievement. Third, as had already been implied, the long civil rights era embraced a host of intellectuals and artists who experimented with a range of politics with the ultimate vision of forging an independent black radicalism. Far from recognizing American nationalism as the suitable arena to achieving democracy, these black leaders (who have tragically become overshadowed by the figure of an idolized Martin Luther King, Jr.) looked beyond national borders and tapped the wells of their radical imaginations to locate an independent and transformative conception of democracy. Finally, it illuminates a long, unbroken line of black radicalism that stretched from old intellectual sages like W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to young black nationalists like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka. This black radical tradition, although distracted by the repressive nature of McCarthyism and despite taking on different political guises, remained at heart one continuous struggle.
Simply put, Black Is a Country is a work of great urgency that forces us to seriously rethink the dialectic of race and nation, a concept that had for the most part been taken for granted by historians. It is a book that should be widely read and reread.
Average customer rating:
- Tough questions
- What Went Wrong
- Compelling and honest
- Putting politics aside...
- Detroit Explained
|
Someone Else's House: American's Unfinished Struggle for Integration
Tamar Jacoby
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| 20th Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Georgia
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Michigan
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
New York
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
America
| Race Relations
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Race Relations
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
African-American Studies
| Special Groups
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0465036260 |
Amazon.com
In this detailed history of race relations between blacks and whites in the post-civil rights era, Tamar Jacoby looks at how the ideal of integration has fared since it was first advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. Blacks have made enormous economic, political, and social progress, and yet integration remains an elusive goal. Jacoby, an experienced journalist whose narrative is well-written and easy to follow, examines the experiences of three cities: Atlanta, Detroit, and New York. She looks at how each has dealt with major racial controversies since the 1960s, including Black Power, racial preferences, and busing. Jacoby considers integration a worthy goal, but criticizes many of the means society has used to reach it. "Devising new strategies will not be easy, but history can guide us, if we know how to listen," she writes. Someone Else's House is perhaps the finest historical account of race relations in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. --John J. Miller
Book Description
Whatever became of Dr. King's dream-the vision of a single, shared community to which both blacks and whites would feel they belong?
In this detailed history of relations between blacks and whites in the post-civil rights era, journalist Tamar Jacoby looks at how the ideal of integration has fared since it was first advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing that though blacks have made enormous economic, political, and social progress, a true sense of community has remained elusive. Her story leads us through the volatile world of New York in the 1960s, the center of liberal idealism about race; Detroit in the 1970s, under its first black mayor, Coleman Young; and Atlanta in the 1980s and '90s, ruled by a coalition of white businessmen and black politicians. Based on extensive research and local reporting, her vivid, dramatic account evokes the special flavor of each city and decade, and gives voice to a host of ordinary individuals struggling to translate a vision into a reality.
Customer Reviews:
Tough questions.......2002-01-15
"If you can't call a black thug a thug, you're a racist." Newsweek reporter Tamar Jacoby poses the kind of questions that makes well-meaning white liberals flinch. But it is these people, I think, she is trying to prod to finish the work their forebears began so well.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s accomplished so much that by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.
And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. Jacoby wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant new mantras of separationism?
In America today there's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder."
"Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Jacoby, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense."
What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that."
But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is a long, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."
Jacoby's ultimate tough question is this: Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?
What Went Wrong.......2001-08-31
In ýSomeone Elseýs House,ý Tamar Jacoby lucubrates on many of the root problems that plague racial relations in America today. Wisely, she limits her scope within this vast arena to Black--White affiliations and geographically, she confines the effort to a comparison of New York City, Detroit, and Atlanta. Most of the trouble she discusses can be traced back to giving unmitigated credence to blatantly stupid ideas.
Each cityýs section devotes ample time to one of the metropolisý long serving mayors. In New York City, John Lindsey is portrayed as an impeccably intentioned, dedicated public servant encumbered with an overwhelming streak of naiveté. Based on mountains of evidence, nobody can question his sincere commitment to racial reconciliation or to improving the quality of life for black citizens too long held back by endemic discrimination, but the vagaries he chose to rectify the situation severely compounded the situation. By listening to the loudest black radicals, rather than the intelligent but more tempered individuals, (tragically initiating a trend that has accelerated until today) genuine progress was sacrificed to attempt unobtainable placation. Ms. Jacoby does not lay all the blame at NYCýs charismatic mayorýs feet; indeed there was plenty to go around. The White House, the all-powerful Ford Foundation, the psittacine major media, and a host of other allegedly liberal players either shared Lindseyýs unreasonable hopes or postulated that appeasement would be far easier to deliver than improvement.
Detroit is shown as a failure in every regard and much of the blame goes directly to the cityýs entrenched Mayor Coleman Young. He is limned as a racist/separatist who advanced the most radical elements of the ýBlack Powerý movement. While spuriously claiming to have the best interests of their fellow black citizens at heart, Mayor Young and these thugs he countenanced made life a living hell for honest lower class back citizens. His open hostility to whites drove many business out of town leaving scores of unemployed poor black people behind with no way to reach the jobs in the suburbs. By declaring war on his own police department, he empowered criminals, and while a majority of perpetrators may have been black, so was a substantial majority of the victims. Sadly, even though Coleman Youngýs near-eternal reign finally came to a close, Detroit still has not been able to put all its pieces back together, and long smoldering racial tensions remain strained.
Atlanta is clearly shown to be the most successful of the three profiled cities; yet it comes across as far from a model of harmonious interracial coexistence. Mayor Andrew Young lacked the hateful separatism of Detroitýs Young and displayed a firmer grasp of reality than New Yorkýs Lindsey; still he strayed from Martin Luther Kingýs dream and implemented dubious racial counting. After a decade of affirmative action, Ms. Jacoby documents how little concrete progress was made. She also adequately evaluates the damage done by this well-meaning problem. She writes of the resentment toward those who achieved status or jobs based soley on skin color. She discusses the defeatism that afflicted many blacks who knew that their qualifications were not the source of their success or some case not even of interest to their employers. Most interestingly, she recounts fraudulent cases of alleged black companies that served as fronts for dishonest white businessmen and provides evidence that a handful of black companies reaped the vast majority of affirmative action's spoils.
If the tome has a drawback it plods on occasion. The 600+ page work would probably have been enhanced by a 100 page edit--at least half of which should have come from the Atlanta section. Considerable information about the cityýs leap forward since the mid-1980s was interesting but not directly relevant.
While maintaining impressive objectivity throughout the historical reporting, Ms. Jacoby obviously has a firmly help point of view on race relations, and at no time does she attempt to obfuscate her convictions. She closes with a series of common sense recommendations and truthfully advocates acculturation, mentoring, and a valuing of individuality over group labeling. While most proponents of these proven techniques are conservatives who generally defensively suggest them while fighting to prove they are not racists, Ms. Jacobyýs overall political leanings are not on display here. She is to be commended for unapologetically putting forth such ideas. There is nothing racist about calling upon everyone to do his her or best, and giving one his or her own identity is more respectful than herding people together into some artificial category. While these opinions may appear revolutionary and controversial today, Tamar Jacoby is not the first person to call for judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Compelling and honest.......2001-07-24
To summarize, Tamar Jacoby's book is compelling and blatantly honest. Perhaps it is too honest for some people to handle. Race relations and the successes and failures of public policy were analyzed in several US cities. Having grown up in the NY area, I found her take on NY incidents to be insightful and brutallly candid
Putting politics aside..........2000-07-11
...this book was dissapointing.
It tries to be a complication of three "case studies" in racial harmony: New York, Detroit, and Atlanta. While it is surprising that someone who worked for the New York Times (on the editorial page, no less!) would write a book that highlights the failure of liberal policy to further the cause of racial harmony, it lacks cohesiveness & depth. It reads like a bunch of daily newspaper articles loosely stitched together--no foresight, no hindsight. There are detailed accounts of the day-by-day happenings of important events, but very little effort is given to tying these events into the big picture. Indeed, there were times I got very frustrated, because she would take 25-50 pages to explain an event in excruciating detail, then wrap it up with some statement like "But this event wasn't very important anyways."
There are no proper notations, either. The citations are just listed in the appendix, with a general page reference. This is a real shortcoming, as you never know whether or not a given statement will have a citation. If you're using this book for secondary research, beware!
Lastly, there are occasions where the author either contradicts herself, or appears to contradict herself with an ambiguous statement.
My opinion is that the author was well-intentioned, and this is an important subject, but the book fell victim to very poor editting. If more time and effort had been spent in making the book flow better, have greater depth, proper citations, and fewer errors, it (would have been) a lot better.
Detroit Explained.......2000-07-10
Growing up in Detroit in the 1970's, I had no concept of what a suburb was until some of my friends started moving out of the city. Their parents moved there primarily for the better schools. Once I started visiting them, I begin to wonder why everything out there was so nice and new, while things in the city were so run down and increasingly blighted. This book provides the best description I've ever read of the events that led to Detroit's demise. I encourage anyone who's interested in the problems of urban America to read this book.
Book Description
The Unfinished Struggle is one of the most concise, comprehensive, and accessible histories of the modern American labor movement ever written. Labor scholar and activist Steve Babson's dramatic narrative examines the numerous attempts to organize workers from the Great Uprising of 1877 to the sitdown strikes of the 1930s to the present day. Babson illuminates the tumultuous past, evolving agenda, and continuing conflicts of the labor movement. He carefully identifies the causes of labor's decline in recent decades and explains union leaders' attempts to revive their organizations. Most important, Babson shows readers how the fortunes of organized labor are tied to larger trends in American history.
Customer Reviews:
Good concise history of labor movement.......2000-09-21
The Unfinished Struggle, considering its brevity and the number of years that it covers, represents an adequate, even good, effort at describing the difficult, hazardous, uneven, and highly compromised journey of the labor movement since the Great Railroad Uprising of 1877.
Since the book is intended for those without thorough knowledge of the labor movement, a shortcoming of the book is the absence of any history of unions prior to 1877. How did they start? What was/is the social, economic, and political/legal context of unions? But the book is a window into the practicality and realities of unionism since 1877.
The author shows that other than for a brief thirty-year period the labor movement has mostly struggled for relevancy, even survival. It is not clear as to the degree of optimism that the author has regarding the completion of the struggle. As a practical matter, a reading of this book leaves little room for optimism.
In the absence of great detail, the author focuses on historical "turning points" as markers to indicate the standing and prospects of the labor movement. Among those selected for discussion were the Strike of 1877, the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, WWI, the Steel Strike of 1919, the Great Depression, the Wagner Act of 1935, WWII, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the PATCO Strike of 1981, and the change in the leadership of the AFL-CIO in the mid-90s. In addition the conflicts and contradictions within the labor movement are well assessed. Basically, the book is a very sobering account of the labor movement.
The author acknowledges the next to impossible task of writing a short history of the labor movement because of its complex past, but he has done a very credible and worthy job.
Customer Reviews:
unique and invaluable.......1999-10-21
This is a unique and invaluable book. It is the only first-person narrative in English of the East Timorese resistance from the 1975 invasion to the 1992 capture of Xanana Gusmão. The cataclysmic events of the Indonesian occupation that have been carefully chronicled before in several third-person accounts are presented here as moments of danger and decision in an individual's life. Pinto, with the editorial help of Jardine, has succeeded in giving the reader a vivid sense of how the East Timorese have struggled and survived through the torrent of violence that has been unleashed upon them. The reader follows Pinto from a worry-free childhood, when he played games such as kalek (which involves knocking fruits out of a certain type of tree), to a danger-filled adolescence and adulthood. At age 13, he fled with his family from his hometown of Remexio (southeast of Dili) while mortar shells and bombs rained down around them. For a year and a half, they lived in a town further south, just out of the Indonesian army's reach. There he learned guerrilla fighting and weekly alternated guard duty on the front line with farm work. Overcoming his initial trepidation and despondency, he gained the resolve to fight until death. When the Indonesian military (ABRI) escalated its counter-insurgency campaign in late 1977, Pinto and his family fled again. The thousands who took refuge in the forested hills became cut off from their food supplies: "sometimes we only had a piece of manioc to eat for the whole day." Each family spent the day hiding from the soldiers and the night searching for food. Pinto, with his parents, siblings and 50 other people, were captured after one year of hardscrabble life in the jungle. ABRI soldiers had forced several recently captured East Timorese to lead them to the others in the forest. His hometown Remexio, where ABRI resettled the captives, was turned into a concentration camp. It was a demoralizing time. He saw his friends, relatives and neighbors die of dysentery and malnutrition. He saw a manacled Xavier do Amaral, the head of the main resistance organization, brought before the townspeople to make a coerced `apology.' With the help of relatives, Pinto's family soon moved to Dili in late 1978. As many East Timorese were driven out of the forests and into the cities and towns, their terrain of resistance shifted from the liberated zones to the Indonesian-controlled territory. They learned the arts of dissimulation under the harsh conditions of a settler colonialism. Pinto describes how he would appear loyal and submissive before the Indonesians with whom he had to daily interact, while privately dreaming of independence and secretly scheming with friends. Pinto joined an underground movement in Dili in 1983 that worked undetected amidst the occupiers. It was this underground movement, constantly in touch with the guerrillas still in the hills, that was behind the highly visible civil protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pinto, as the head of the underground at that time, reveals the planning behind the actions during the visits of the Pope (October 1989) and the US ambassador John Monjo (January 1990). His eyewitness behind-the-scenes account of the demonstration to the Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1992 and the massacre of 271 people is essential reading on this event. Particularly important is Pinto's narration of how Xanana Gusmao lived underground (literally) in Dili from February 1991 to November 1992. Pinto's unadorned and ordinary prose indicates the mental balance he has been able to maintain through extraordinary experiences, such as his vertiginous mind games with Indonesian intelligence while posing as a double agent and his dangerous overland escape from East Timor. The hyped-up, overcharged spy thrillers of pulp fiction are no match for the terrors of real-life experiences straightforwardly narrated. For those who know little about East Timor, this book makes for an excellent introduction. To complement Pinto's gripping narrative, Jardine has provided background material on Indonesian and US politics in prefatory and concluding essays. Much care has been put into the footnotes, bibliography, and selection of photographs. For those who know much about this tortured half-island, Pinto's inside information reveals much that they would not have known. In sum, this book is a landmark achievement in the literature on East Timor.
A very powerful book.......1998-02-20
Constâncio Pinto's life is an exemple of what it means to live in fear for most of your life and, despite that, maintain a constant sense of justice in a world that's not fair. As a brazilian, I certainly can relate with his testimony - of a catholic, portuguese-speaking man. He describes with incredible simplicity and humanity (and that's why the book is so powerful) all his life as an East Timor resistence member, seeing your friends being killed and being himself brutally tortured and persecuted. East Timor's fight is a methaphor for the most brutal opression vs. the faith in freedom, justice and peace. And with people like Constâncio, we are reminded that peace and justice are always achievable no matter how we suffer and no matter how hard is our struggle.
Amazon.com
How do Americans, long innocent of such things, comprehend large-scale acts of domestic terrorism? How do they commemorate the victims of such deeds? In this unfortunately timely book, historian Edward T. Linenthal examines these questions as they were addressed by the people of Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
In that attack, 168 men, women, and children died. Each left behind stunned, grieving relatives and loved ones; each left behind a personal history suddenly become part of the cultural and psychic property of the nation, as in the instance of Baylee Almon, whose corpse, cradled in the arms of a fireman, became an iconic image. As Linenthal writes in this careful work of cultural history, it fell on Oklahomans to process their grief in the wake of "violent mass death," no easy task, and to design and construct an appropriate memorial--which, after painful arguments over every detail, they did, and to stunning effect. Linenthal's thoughtful account summarizes some of the many lessons to be drawn from the Oklahoma City attack, lessons that, sadly, the world has had to learn anew. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
On April 19, 1995 the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City shook the nation, destroying our complacent sense of safety and sending a community into a tailspin of shock, grief, and bewilderment. Almost as difficult as the bombing itself has been the aftermath, its legacy for Oklahoma City and for the nation, and the struggle to recover from this unprecedented attack. In The Unfinished Bombing, Edward T. Linenthal explores the many ways Oklahomans and other Americans have tried to grapple with this catastrophe. Working with exclusive access to materials gathered by the Oklahoma City National Memorial Archive and drawing from over 150 personal interviews with family members of those murdered, survivors, rescuers, and many others, Linenthal looks at how the bombing threatened cherished ideas about American innocence, sparked national debate on how to respond to terrorism at home and abroad, and engendered a new "bereaved community" in Oklahoma City itself. Linenthal examines how different stories about the bombing were told through positive narratives of civic renewal and of religious redemption and more negative narratives of toxicity and trauma. He writes about the extraordinary bonds of affection that were created in the wake of the bombing, acts of kindness, empathy, and compassion that existed alongside the toxic legacy of the event. The Unfinished Bombing offers a compelling look at both the individual and the larger cultural consequences of one of the most searing events in recent American history.
Customer Reviews:
Memory and History in Modern America.......2007-01-02
In so many ways this is a fascinating and thoughtful book on one of the most important tragedies in American public life in the last decade of the twentieth century. No area of historical study in the last twenty years has been more important than the nature of memory and "The Unfinished Bombing" is an attempt to understand how Americans have recalled the April 19, 1995, instance of domestic terrorism that took place in Oklahoma City. On that day Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols conspired to explode a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killing 168 people, injuring many more, and opening a wound on the national landscape about the nature of modern American democracy. It is an exceptional study of how stories about the past become a master narrative, and what lessons they teach to those affected. This memory is constructed gradually over time as people reflect on the meaning of what has transpired, and much of what emerges is not so much a fable or falsehood as it is a kind of poetry about events and situations that have great significance for the people involved. The memories over time become more significant than the cold, hard facts of the past, insofar as they are recoverable at all, and become the essential truths of the past for the members of a cultural group who hold them, enact them, or perceive them. This book helps to pull those ideas together into a coherent discussion concerning the 1995 bombing.
Edward T. Linenthal, now at Indiana University where he edits the "Journal of American History," draws on extensive field work in Oklahoma City to construct this analysis of public memory and memorialization. Most interesting to me was how three preferred narratives emerged from the bombing, all rooted in personal understandings of what took place. The first was a progressive story of how the tragedy was overcome. It was about the heroism of the rescue workers, the support of citizens throughout the nation, and the recovery of Oklahoma City through urban renewal, commemoration, and a demonstration of character. This is very much, as Linenthal wrote, a story of "yes, it was horrendous but..." (p. 41) before telling all of the good that emerged from the experience. A second narrative, Linenthal believes, is one of redemption, "A crisis of meaning, as people struggled to locate it in an ongoing religious narrative" (p. 53). In this narrative, the pain and suffering of those who died, as well as those who survived, served as a sacrament, in the words of one survivor, Susan Urbach, "an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace" (p. 70). Finally, Linenthal unpacks what he calls a toxic narrative, one filled with loss, mourning, pain, and suffering. Sometimes it manifested itself in anger and agony, sometimes in fear and a desire for retribution, sometimes in the broken lives those who could not deal with the tragedy.
It is this last narrative that Linenthal spends the most time with, writing at length about what he calls a "wounded community." He describes in detail the process whereby members of the families of those at the Murrah building waited to hear if their loved ones had been rescued, or if bodies had been recovered, and finally how they commemorated those lost. Not only that, the toll on those working on the rescue efforts was intense. The best example, well told in "The Unfinished Bombing," is of Chris Fields, the fireman who became a celebrity when his picture was taken bringing the body of a one-year-old girl (Baylee Almon) out of the rubble, and the mother of the child, Aren Almon-Kok, who also became a celebrity. Neither had any desire for such a spotlight to be shined on their lives, but modern media omnivorous in its appetite for visuality turned them into public figures. The fact that they handled this scrutiny, dare I say intrusion, into their private lives with grace during a time of trauma says much about the quiet dignity of many of those who had to deal with this act of homegrown terrorism. Linenthal, tells in this episode the interweaving of the toxic, redemptive, and progressive narratives in the lives of those at the Murrah building on the morning of April 19th.
Toward the end of this account Linenthal discusses the process of commemoration of this terrorist act. Here he is concerned mostly with the public memory offered for all to see. He notes that in such instances considerable debate is necessary to determine hat exactly "is being remembered, who is being remembered, and the forms through which remembrance is expressed" (p. 195). Hierarchies of those who suffered found expression in the commemoration, discussions of whether or not to mention the terrorists who perpetrated the bombing also took place. And then, of course, there was the difficult process of deciding on the design to be employed in the memorial. What resulted was akin to a public park, and questions about its serene nature overcoming the horror of the event abounded. In the end, through a convoluted process of discourse involving huge numbers of people most agreed that this memorial was a fitting tribute to those killed, as well as those injured both physically and emotionally, in this terrorist attack. Its incorporation into the National Park Service ensured that it became a major part of the official memory of the United States.
There is much to praise in this important book, and little to criticize. I recommend it as a fine case study of how we remember tragic events in the United States.
An academic approach to a painful event.......2003-03-15
The 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City shook the nation and produced a modest flurry of books. This late addition fills in a few blanks that may interest specialists.
A life of Timothy McVeigh might enjoy wide appeal, and terrorist plots have a gruesome fascination, but readers wonýt find them here. Edward Linenthal, Professor of Religion and American Culture at the University of Wisconsin spends little time on the bombers and the explosion. He has written a history of ideas, an academic field in which the books may outnumber the readers. In works of this genre, the author first asks a question. Thus, was the bombing a senseless atrocity? Or was it an act one would expect in the U.S., a culture that glamorizes violence? Having asked a question, the author doesnýt answer it. He collects everyone elseýs answer, assembling page after page of quotes from editorials, talk shows, pundits, politicians, clergymen, and academics. After recording these thoughts, the author draws no conclusions. The chapter ends. Another chapters introduces another question. Was God or Satan responsible for the catastrophe? Oklahomans are a conservative people, and there is no shortage of feeling that a federal government that keeps the Bible out of schools bears much responsibility. Ironically, clergymen are far more restrained than laymen in laying blame. Mostly, clergymen admit they canýt explain it.
For years after the blast, the city argued vehemently over a proper memorial for the victims. The author considers this such an important controversy that he devotes half the book to it. With the memorial complete, I doubt if many residents of Oklahoma City want to read about the pros and cons of the design. It has even less appeal to anyone else.
A timely casestudy of the American mourning/memorial process.......2002-03-07
'The Unfinished Bombing' provides a glimpse into what happened in Oklahoma City AFTER the bombing, and details the evolution of the National Memorial completed in 2000. In light of what happened on 9/11/2001, this book provides a remarkable insight into how we as a society grieve and memorialize sites of national tragedy. This is not any easy or simple process, and Linenthal does an excellent job in explaining what happened in OKC, and the wide variety of issues that were confonted in developing the memorial.
I would recommend this book to anyone considering how America should memorialize the World Trade Center site.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on August 1, 2005. The length of the article is 716 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.(Book Review)
Author: Richard King
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2005
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 71
Issue: 3
Page: 736(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 965 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.(Book review)
Author: Robert Teigrob
Publication:
Canadian Journal of History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 41
Issue: 2
Page: 406(3)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Contemporary Asia, published by Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers on March 1, 1998. The length of the article is 4557 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: East Timor's Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance. (book reviews)
Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publication:
Journal of Contemporary Asia (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1998
Publisher: Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers
Volume: v28
Issue: n1
Page: p122(9)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on October 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1816 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration. (book reviews)
Author: Scott McConnell
Publication:
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 1998
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Issue: n86
Page: p72(4)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Books:
- Bringing Out the Best in People
- Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM
- Calculus
- Can Japan Compete?
- Career Development Interventions in the 21st Century, Second Edition
- Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, Revised Edition: Birth to Age 5 (Shelov, Caring for your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5)
- CCTV for Security Professionals
- Challenge of Third World Development, The (4th Edition)
- Children Just Like Me
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Great Novels of Anatole France: Penguin Island, the Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard And the Revolt of
- IMMACULATE DECEPTION
- Airport Systems: Planning, Design, and Management
- Broodstock Management and Egg and Larval Quality
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
- History: Fiction or Science
- Hotel Paradise
- The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture
- Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
- Aromatic Plants: Basic and Applied Aspects
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Convergences: Inventories of the Present)
Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
