Gerald Horne

This book, as the title aptly suggests, is about the life of Lawrence Dennis. A fascinating and, in ways, frightening life. Dennis’s origins have been unclear for years, and investigators, biographers, and agencies like the FBI have long searched to find out who the man really was. He was biracial, born to a Black mother, and precocious enough to be a renowned child preacher who toured the U.S. and Europe before he went into school, the military, and later the diplomatic service. But born show more in the American South and aware of the barriers colour placed on those who weren't white, he passed for white. Despite suspicions about his race that followed him throughout his public life, he garnered enough respect and connections to place himself as a leading fascist leader, even though he is now forgotten.

Unlike someone like Walter White who passed to gain access into Ku Klux Klan groups and pass on information to the NAACP about their planned murders and terrorist activities, Dennis simply passed for very selfish reasons and aligning with Hitler and Mussolini. Instead he took advantage of the economic depression, as fascists tend to, to service himself to such a cause, fully aware of its implications. Gerald Horne works incredibly well with the scant information that was available to him and paints a well researched portrait of this man’s life and his times. show less

Over/badly written, repetitive, full of passive voice obscuring who did what, and choked with ten-dollar words where ten-cent words (or no words) would be better. I like my adverbs, I’ll admit, but describing a provocative action as one that “stirred the pot irately” comes a lot closer to “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” than an author should get. The basic argument, which is that slavery and the resulting threat of slave rebellions were behind many of the key decisions that show more England and the American colonists made that ultimately led to the Revolution, seems sound: white Americans defended slavery as a means to get rich, while the English were less certain that it was worth the costs especially since they were also concerned with the Carribean and its bloodier revolts. show less

Okay so this was so dense it was so hard to understand for someone whos not a historian which is really unfortunate because this is such an important book for anyone who's been thru the american school system. It's a shame... Because the analysis was spot on, but it was just so hard to read! The last 2 chapters were the best & most important but I wish he talked more about the black loyalists actually during the revolutionary war, and also the aftermath of the war & how this affected them show more (and also the people who made it to nova scotia and stuff which is how I heard of this book in the first place) show less

A well-documented history of the Los Angeles Watts rebellion of the 1960s.