Sherman (Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, not reviewed) is uniquely positioned to write on the British experience of Palestine: Born in Jerusalem under the mandate, he is a lawyer and historian. Rarely has the story of the mandate period in Palestine been told from the point of view of its caretakers, the British. Sherman uses diaries, letters, and interviews to recount the reactions of British subjects who found themselves working and living in what was then Palestine during the 30 years of British rule. From the outset, Whitehall naively tried to appease irreconcilable forces. The picture of the occupiers that emerges from the first half of this book makes it clear why: The British men and women quoted by Sherman project an air of earnest good intentions, leavened by a condescension to both Jew and Arab that often borders on (and sometimes lapses into) racism. The lasting impression of English life in 1920s Palestine is of a backwater in which the colonialists struggle to maintain a semblance of old-country habits from fox hunting (jackals, actually) to Gilbert and Sullivan. But with the '30s and the beginning of mass immigration of Jews into Palestine, tensions burst into violence repeatedly. And the aftermath of WW II brings the bloody, messy end of the mandate. The first half of this book suffers from the repetitive nature of daily life in an insular community, but the final two chapters, which take the story from 1939 to the end in 1948, make grimly compelling reading. Sherman writes elegantly himself, and many of his sources are insightful, particularly Sir Henry Gurney, the last high commissioner, in selections from his diaries. The casual distaste that many of the British display for the Jews (and, to a lesser extent, the Arabs) will discomfit many, but this is a readable version of the battle for Israeli independence from a perspective that will be unfamiliar to most Americans.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-500-25116-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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