A powerful, poignant, reflection on the past and future of Black archives.
A preeminent archivist blends memoir, archival theory, and Black history in this nonfiction book.
“Archives are an unfulfilled promise,” Berry writes, adding that despite their centrality to understanding our past, they’re rife with “silences, gaps, [and] missing records.” This is nowhere more apparent than in the way leading archival institutions have treated African Americans “as footnotes and ledger entries in the documents of those with more money and time.” In this genre-defying work, Berry blends her own story as a Black woman and archivist with a larger commentary on archival theory and Black history. Born in the Missouri Ozarks to a Black father and Jewish mother, the author grew up in a region whose historical identification was defined by its whiteness (more than 40,000 African Americans fled the region in response to Jim Crow violence). While the area’s notable historians and archival repositories erased the history of Black communities, businesses, and culture, Berry’s father—who never graduated high school—ran a local museum that preserved this marginalized history. This history is retold in the book through powerful visual archive of photographs and scans of documents that defy standard archival categorization (such as a poem scrawled on an envelope). In addition to retelling her experiences in the Ozarks, Berry also centers her career as a Black archivist in a field dominated by white librarians and historians. “Black archivists are conspicuously absent from conversations about Black archives,” she emphasizes. These vignettes from her personal experiences center the ways “those who should be our allies,” including academic historians who write on Black history, sideline and demean the efforts and perspectives of Black archivists as if being the user of archival material as a scholar is more important than the role of the archivist in compiling, organizing, preserving, and acquiring the material. A digital curator, Berry is among the leading archivists of the 21st century. What makes this book special is not only her deeply personal connection to Black archives, but her learned discussion of how archival theory intersects with Black history.
A powerful, poignant, reflection on the past and future of Black archives.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798218831486
Page Count: 89
Publisher: We Here Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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