A forthright, intriguing dissection of the history of a founding religious text.
A literary and historical examination of the Bible’s earliest books.
Wright sets out some ambitious goals for his debut foray into biblical textual analysis: He seeks to untangle the historical factors behind the composition and transmission of the first 12 books of the Bible, from Genesis to 2 Kings. Along the way, he takes readers on a quick but comprehensive tour of the ancient Near East and gives shorthand accounts of the period’s surviving literature. He also explains such topics as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Babylonian captivity in clear, accessible prose that might have been seen as heretical in earlier eras—although Wright clarifies at the outset that his book is about history and not faith. He then goes on to matter-of-factly discuss what he sees as extensive Old Testament plagiarism of earlier Eastern epics such as Gilgamesh, the ahistorical nature of such characters as Joseph, and the precise real-world motivations that ancient Hebrew writers might have had for penning the narratives they did. He portrays Israel in these well-designed pages as just one earthly kingdom among many, suffering defeats at the hands of the Assyrians and the Chaldeans and seeking to bolster its self-esteem in the face of years of exile and dispossession. He sees this need as the seedbed for the Old Testament’s founding stories: “Pen, ink, and papyrus were the writers’ weapons; inspiration was their ammo, and Genesis through Kings II became the salvo that fought back.” In his quietly assertive, scrupulously researched account, the Hebrew Bible is depicted as an overwhelmingly important text but not in any way divine. Rather, he writes, it’s a text that can and should be analyzed like any other.
A forthright, intriguing dissection of the history of a founding religious text.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475972429
Page Count: 206
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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