Perspicacious, evenhanded and well grounded—a critical, contextually rich study of the Jewish-Palestinian imbroglio.
How one people’s dream, the establishment of a Jewish state, became another people’s nightmare.
Born into a Zionist family that fled Luxembourg in 1940, historian Mayer (The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revoltuions, 2000, etc.) has watched events unfold in Israel with interest and growing consternation. Enlisting his considerable erudition in European history, he embarks on a chronological breakdown of the Zionist movement: its emergence during the “high noon” of Western colonial imperialism; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the establishment of a binational Mandate with arbitrary borders and little regard for the native Palestinians toiling the land; partition and independence from Britain in 1948. Mayer incorporates the messianic ideals of such prominent Zionists as Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann, as well as internal critics like Ahad Haam and Martin Buber, who warned early on of the imploding “Arab Question.” Zionism’s characterization of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” set the stage for Arab rancor and resistance as Jewish immigration rose and borders mutated, prompting the first intifada of 1929. Mayer never loses sight of the similar Palestinian Arab urge toward self-determination, born at the same time as the Zionists’ but swept aside by the world’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust and the decision to collectively atone for it with the creation of Israel. In his magisterial “Prolegomenon,” Mayer demonstrates how Jabotinsky’s call for an “iron wall” of military strength against the Arabs prevailed among politicians from Ben-Gurion to Sharon, draining whatever reserves of innocence and entitlement Israel possessed. Beleaguered by irrepressible Arab neighbors and engulfed by violence, the present-day American-backed military state is paying dearly for this hubris. The opening section was actually written last, the author notes in a postscript: “There was no way to conclude this book, the story it tells being indeterminate [so] I turned to writing the thematically framed Prolegomenon.”
Perspicacious, evenhanded and well grounded—a critical, contextually rich study of the Jewish-Palestinian imbroglio.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84467-235-6
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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