Rich in learning and observation, Unsettled ought to inspire discussion, perhaps even controversy at points. A splendid...
A lucid exposition, informed by science and poetry alike, of the qualities and historical accidents that have made the Jewish people so important a presence in so many parts of the world.
Konner (Anthropology/Emory Univ.; Medicine at the Crossroads, 1993) weaves a personal story often retold into his narrative: that of a loss of faith truly felt as a loss, of years in that wilderness before growing “back into Jewishness as children entered my life.” (Some rabbis look askance at this “pediatric Judaism,” he notes, but he counters with his favorite definition of a Jew: “Someone who has Jewish children.”) His larger story reiterates his own: though the Jewish people have long been sustained and moved forward by Jews who did not practice Judaism, at heart the religion itself is the greatest sustenance, a pastoral, fugitive vision of a single God born in repudiation of the pantheistic agriculturalists and city-dwellers of the ancient Near East. Though militant, and though capable fighters, the early Jews, Konner writes, always found themselves sandwiched between stronger neighbors, a buffer state between mighty empires; that fact, he suggests, and the fact of long exile and wandering afterward were important influences in the development of the Jewish character, and far more meaningful than other supposed traits such as a gift for study or a knack for making money (characteristics that Konner, wearing his anthropologist’s hat, has great fun exploring). Borrowing a page from the British functionalists of old, Konner examines Orthodox dietary laws (“It’s not that the animals are clean in their biology or habits, it’s that their categories are cleanly, unambiguously defined”); drawing on Freud, Marx, and others, he looks into the image of the “predatory Jew”; turning over pages of recent history, he explores the considerable Jewish resistance to fascism, resistance that informs the motto Never again and, he suggests, does much to explain the modern state of Israel vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And so on, with some new revelation and novel interpretation at every turn.
Rich in learning and observation, Unsettled ought to inspire discussion, perhaps even controversy at points. A splendid treatise that will inform readers of whatever background.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03244-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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