Lewis, a distinguished expert on the Middle East, examines the extent to which anti-Semitism affects the Arab-Israeli conflict. Using his authoritative command of historical material, Lewis ranges back and forth through history to remind us of the origins of anti. Semitism. This leads to a study of the evolving and complex Arab attitudes toward Zionism, Jews, and Israel. To make his case, Lewis isolates several kinds of hostility toward Jews. He discusses the normal hostility that emerges when two nations or two people seek control of the same land, the "normal" distaste for the foreign customs of those from different cultures or ethnic groups, and the abnormal hostility that arises when anti-Semitism emerges from an identification of Jews with cosmic evil. In Lewis' analysis, examples of the first two kinds of "normal" prejudice can be discerned in Islamic history, but it was only after the Suez crisis in 1956 and especially the Six-Day War in 1967 that anti-Semitism came to predominate in Islamic thinking about Jews and Israel. Lewis thinks it is still to be determined whether the Arab-Israeli conflict has resulted in the permanent infection of Islamic thinking, or whether the anti-Semitic excesses will disappear after a political solution to the conflict is worked out. In many ways, Lewis covers too much familiar territory and therefore has only a limited amount of space left for an analysis based on the historical knowledge given. Nonetheless, a first-rate introduction to the analysis of Arab anti Semitism.
Pub Date: May 27, 1986
ISBN: 0753800330
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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