An odd book but nonetheless a unique lens through which to view the conflicted Promised Land.
An Israeli tour guide considers the complicated methods, both academic and personal, of performing for Christian pilgrims.
Having made aliya to Israel at age 22, more than 30 years ago, Feldman (Sociology/Ben-Gurion Univ. of the Negev), who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, sustained a living as a licensed Israeli tour guide mostly for Palestinian travel agencies in Jerusalem while also gaining his doctorate in anthropology. Here, the author chronicles his experiences shepherding tourists, mostly Protestants, on pilgrimages to the Holy Land as well as accounts of his interviews with colleagues and analyses of academic literature. The result is a vocabulary rather mixed and murky, as the author struggles between introducing analytic speak in defining “social and cultural codes” that the Holy Land has generated over the centuries (i.e., that the re-created panorama of the actual site has been manipulated over the centuries by a certain “visual mastery in the West”) and his emotional experience at the “seduction” of Christianity. The Holy Land generates enormous emotional power in the viewer, though the experience varies for Protestants and Evangelicals, intent on following the steps of Jesus, versus the Catholic, focused on shrines and iconography. However, both tours create a kind of “suspension of disbelief and skepticism” that the guide must encourage and respect, especially if he is going to get good tips at the end. Feldman writes extensively about “claiming and shaping space” as key to how the tourist/pilgrim views the Bible land tour; most often, that means ignoring the Muslim/Palestinian presence. The author delineates the two-year program for gaining an Israeli license, involving hiking and extensive New Testament training, and the prickly particulars of tips and souvenirs. Traversing the Separation Wall marking the passage into Bethlehem underscores the fact that pilgrimage becomes a form of political power.
An odd book but nonetheless a unique lens through which to view the conflicted Promised Land.Pub Date: April 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-02137-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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