A work of broad appeal, for the history buff and mystery lover alike.
The search for the world’s oldest biblical manuscript.
In an intriguing and wide-ranging tale, journalist Tigay takes readers along on a mystery spanning two centuries and four continents. The author, son of a Hebrew scholar, became fascinated with the story of Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a Jewish-born Christian convert who dealt in antiquities and was briefly one of the most famous men in England. Prior to his suicide in 1884, Shapira had claimed to have procured an original copy of the book of Deuteronomy, a find that was poised to shake the foundations of biblical scholarship. However, accusations that the document was forged led Shapira to disappear and, eventually, take his own life. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls several decades later renewed the possibility that Shapira’s scrolls were real; but by then, they were lost. Tigay is the latest in a line of scholars and adventurers intent on discovering more about Shapira and, if possible, his mysterious scrolls. The author succeeds in weaving two stories together: the tale of Shapira’s life, career, and downfall and his own search for the scrolls. Both are arresting. Shapira’s tragic tale, painstakingly reconstructed, is touching and informative. “No matter how far Shapira had come or how high he had climbed…the world he had so strived to impress and in which he had tried so desperately to fit still saw him as a tricky little Jew from Poland,” writes the author. His own tale concerning his dogged search for the manuscript builds satisfying drama. He takes readers along on forays into quaint museums, aging archives, libraries of all sizes, private homes, and even the unoccupied space where Shapira took his own life. In the end, Tigay found what he was looking for, though not as he expected. Beyond that, he also came to know Shapira as a human being, not simply as a shadowy figure from the past.
A work of broad appeal, for the history buff and mystery lover alike.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220641-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
