A richly researched history of Italian Jewry and its will to live on.
Forced behind walls.
As University of Warwick historian Lee writes, the world’s first Jewish ghetto emerged in Venice out of social, economic, and political upheaval. Venice had always been a trade and shipping center. But plague, wars, encroaching Ottoman forces, and new Atlantic colonial powers shaved away some of the city’s prestige. Economic insecurity bred social fear. “Like many other European states,” writes Lee, “Venice had long regarded Jews as a threat to its Christian identity. Preachers and patricians constantly warned that, if allowed to live unchecked in the city, Jews would ‘infect’ the Christian faithful, poisoning the minds of the pious and stealing souls away from salvation.” Thus shunned, 16th-century Venetian Jews came to be confined to a separate section of the island city-state. While Jewish parts of towns had always existed, what was new about this ghetto—named for a copper foundry (geto)—was “a clear, generalizable conception of segregation,” writes Lee. “Ghetto” came to stand for any urban space defined by economic stratification and racial difference. “At every level, and in every place, it intersected with concepts of power and place, faith and finance, exclusion and admission; was shaped by notions of gender and disease; and served as a mirror to the societies from which it sprang.” More than a history of a city, the book is a chronicle of a condition, an elegy for Jewish life lived in the paradox of family flourishing and civic exclusion. Even today, writes the author, “the scars of the Ghetto’s past are still plainly visible.” Italian Jewry suffered. Few returned. But the memory of the place matters. “The Ghetto is a testament of hope,” Lee writes. “For every prayer that is said, every meal that is shared, every day that is spent in this most woe-begotten corner of Venice is an affirmation of survival, against all odds, and a silent, deafening cry of defiance, echoing down the centuries— for centuries to come.”
A richly researched history of Italian Jewry and its will to live on.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781541608771
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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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