A polished, quick-moving work of historical biography.
A studied re-creation of the life of a Polish-born Jewish violinist who founded the Palestine Symphony Orchestra and saved hundreds of lives from the Nazis.
Forged from filmmaker and concert pianist Aronson’s PBS documentary of the same name, this work presents a lively, episodic life of Bronislaw Huberman (1882-1947) in a dialogue-rich format that reads like fiction. Born to a hot-tempered tyrant in Silesia who pushed his son to become the musical prodigy he never could be, Huberman grew up practicing his violin constantly, forced to leave home at an early age to study in Warsaw and then Berlin. Enduring his “childhood denied,” he was performing onstage from an early age. In 1895, he received a rare Stradivarius violin from the emperor of Austria Franz Joseph, but he eventually grew to be depressive and miserably nervous. As the world edged into World War I, Huberman initially did not share the Zionist dream of separation; instead, he believed fervently in the value of Jewish assimilation in European culture and espoused liberalism, anti-communism, social responsibility, and pan-Europeanism. However, his views evolved with the increasing oppression of Germany’s Jews under Nazism and his trips to perform in Palestine, where, as evident in the pointedly re-created dialogue here, he was impressed by the intensity of the audience’s music appreciation. In brief chapters, Aronson and co-author George explore how the obsession to create an orchestra took hold of Huberman, prompting him to travel to the United States to ask his friend Albert Einstein to help raise funds while he delegated the work of finding auditoriums in Palestine. Running parallel with Huberman’s journey is the rise of Hitler and the moral collapse of other musicians in not withstanding Nazi racial pressure. The book concludes with a thorough “Rest of the Story” that follows the careers of tertiary characters and the fallout from the war.
A polished, quick-moving work of historical biography.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-28121-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
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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