Twenty-one sparkling essays (originally published in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere) on Israel and the Middle East, covering the period from the Six-Day War up to Benjamin Netanyahu's recent election as Israel's prime minister, by the insightful veteran Israeli journalist, historian, and biographer. Elon (Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Times, 1996, etc.) focuses largely on political and diplomatic events. In two essays written in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War (including the quadrupling of Israel's territory), he presciently expresses concern that his country's extraordinary, lightning-quick victory has been ``marked by more than a trace of arrogance'' and has seemingly resulted in ``a somewhat new, animistic cult of holy places.'' Elon also has a knack for interviewing the right people—not only policymakers, but dissidents and intellectuals who understand a political culture's underlying dynamics. A refreshing change of pace occurs in his more leisurely profiles, particularly one on Yair Hirschfield and Ron Pundik, two academics turned ``freelance'' diplomats who played a key role in initiating and negotiating the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO. His celebrations of the political, cultural, and architectural ambience of Amman, Cairo, and Alexandria, are vivid and persuasive. Referring to the latter, a Mediterranean port that once had significant Greek, Jewish, and other foreign communities during the first centuries a.d., Elon calls it ``the New York of the ancient world, the first world city.'' These pieces make one regret that Elon doesn't turn more often to consider modern Israeli culture and society. When he does, he is powerful and direct, as in a piece describing (and decrying) ``the latent hysteria'' in Israeli life induced by the memory and misuse of the Holocaust. One could not ask for a more informed and discerning guide than Elon to both what is tiresomely old and startlingly new between Israeli Jews and their Arab antagonists and partners.
Pub Date: June 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-231-10742-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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