A thorough, occasionally defensive overview of the young nation from inception to the present by an accomplished Israeli lobbyist and scholar.
The director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel, which sponsors this project, Rubin (The Truth About Syria, 2008, etc.) has marshaled many contributors in this fairly evenhanded survey of the many rich and complex facets of Israeli history, society, government, economics and culture. He establishes immediately that “a great deal about Israel is controversial,” and confronts the issues in a straightforward manner. Such issues include existential insecurity, ongoing Palestinian conflict, fluid borders, diverse immigrant population, living with daily terrorist violence and the sense of being “misunderstood by outside observers.” He reminds readers that Jews even in exile acted as a “national people, arguably the first such in history,” and thus the establishment of Israel was “the continuation of a long historical process,” not merely the result of the Holocaust. The early socialist framework of the kibbutz and moshav, created around farming communities by immigrants with little capital or modern resources, continued well until the 1990s, forming a mostly secular, pluralist, democratic society; today Israel’s economy is driven by technological innovation, while Rubin downplays the country’s vast military strength, insisting that “Israel has never been a militarized country.” The author writes that Israelis want peace and are willing to give up territory captured in the 1967 war and grant a Palestinian state, but are not convinced that the Palestinians are reliable partners. Rubin’s delineation of the numerous political parties is elucidating, and he concludes with an overview of cultural tenets. A sound, basic survey without a rigid agenda, useful for students, tourists and those planning aliyah.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-16230-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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