by Ahron Bregman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2015
A plainspoken but urgent account that is deeply critical of Israel’s policies.
As the Israeli occupation digs in, an Israeli-English journalist and academic unforgivingly delineates its long, gruesome history.
Since the book’s first appearance in the U.K. last summer, war between the Palestinians and Israelis has again broken out in a brutal new chapter of this ongoing, inexorable conflict, as noted by Bregman (Department of War Studies/King’s Coll. London; Warfare in the Middle East Since 1945, 2008, etc.), who served in the Israeli Army during its war in Lebanon in 1982. Israel’s manipulative economic system and policies in the Israeli-occupied territories since the victory of the Six-Day War of 1967 gained vast tracts of land from Egypt, Jordan and Syria have allowed Israel, over four decades, to become a brutal occupier. Bregman claims that the time for making a deal with the Palestinians was ripe during the first decade of that occupation, when Moshe Dayan was still defense minister and his “invisible occupation” was fairly benign and tolerant—before the right-wing Likud Party rendered the occupation “irreversible.” However, in short order, Palestinian land was seized by specious legal means, and messianic settlers were allowed to move into the biblical Hebron (West Bank) in 1968, which Dayan himself recognized later as a catastrophic precedent. Many of the finer points of the demarcations of territory are in dispute, but what remains is the perceived need by Israel to isolate these regions—e.g., after the barriers were erected between the Golan and the rest of Syria in 1975, the residents climbed to “Hills of Shouts” with megaphones to exchange news between families—severely control their economies, restrict movement and maintain surveillance on their citizens, leading to one angry and desperate outbreak after another by the oppressed. After numerous failed peace negotiations and two intifadas, Bregman asserts pessimistically that it may take “many generations before a true reconciliation takes hold.”
A plainspoken but urgent account that is deeply critical of Israel’s policies.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-780-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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