Remarkable but vehemently Marxist reportage from an Israeli journalist who adopts Gaza as her home. Hass, the child of Holocaust survivors and “rabble-rousing” Communists, identified completely with the defiant, impoverished ,and sometimes violent denizens of Gaza when she went there in 1993 to cover a story for the Israeli newspaper Ha—aretz. Soon living with over a million other people in Gaza’s 140 square miles, she displays a curious enthusiasm for a society where “women killed for the sake of family honor are not included in the regular crime statistics [because they] are regarded as male property.” Hass stresses political, not social, freedoms, vividly documenting the daily degradation of ID checking, security sweeps, crushing border closures that cut off the Palestinians” economic lifeline of menial jobs in Israel, and rubber bullets, tear gas, or mass arrests by an overreacting occupation army. This is a partisan, emotional book rather than a historic probe of the Israeli-Arab conflict: rioters who throw bricks or grenades at soldiers or Jewish civilians are “protesters”; and among the issues not discussed is the role of wealthy Arab states who chose to let Arab refugees fester for political expediency. The poignant tragedy of being stateless in Gaza is further diminished by the author’s failure to compare it with conditions for Gazans under Egyptian rule before 1967. Consistent with her special attention to the Communist wing of Gaza’s political tangle, Hass tilts her discussion of the intifada and Arab self-rule away from Arafat’s efforts and toward the few Marxist contributors to the cause of liberating Palestine. The book turns as bitter as sipping from the Mediterranean when all that suffering and sacrifice for denied democratic rights culminates in a totalitarian Palestinian Authority police state where dissenters are jailed and tortured without trial. Hass graces Gaza with revolutionary fire, but ultimately, her book only proves that nothing positive is built on rage.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5739-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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