A provocative, ultimately hopeful view of a tormented place.
A carefully woven history of the city once called “the Bride of Palestine.”
The Israeli-Arab conflict is often chronicled as a clash of monoliths with no personal dimension, though recent works such as Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree (2006) and Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire (2006) mark a humanizing trend. This book joins them: Drawing on the memories of Jewish, Muslim and Christian families with roots in the ancient Arab city, journalist Le Bor does much to give a sense of the “intricacy of a century-old struggle.” That struggle begins with the arrival of Zionist immigrants who saw the old port city of Jaffa as a typically chaotic, dirty Mediterranean place; rejecting it, they built modern communities all around, and in time Jaffa became but a decaying suburb of the new metropolis of Tel Aviv. The city saw much strife in 1921, when anti-immigrant riots spread across Palestine, resulting in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, an event that would be long remembered by both sides. The city was nearly emptied during the war of 1948; the Jewish mayor of Jaffa pleaded with Arab residents to remain, but tens of thousands fled, and in time many residents of Jaffa came to live “as though the Palestinians had never existed.” Many others did not, though, and Le Bor highlights the peacemakers among the city’s ethnic factions, such as an Arab baker whose shop became a nondenominational sanctuary from the troubles outside. As Le Bor observes, Jaffa, still without many of its Arab/Palestinian residents, has lately become gentrified and cleaned up, if sanitized and perhaps soulless in the bargain; against this trend, he writes, community activists are trying “not just to rebuild things but to try to connect them together again. Because Jaffa has to be the place where Jews, Muslims and Christians can connect, like they used to.”
A provocative, ultimately hopeful view of a tormented place.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-32984-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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