A thought-provoking study that non-Israelis will find particularly fascinating.
A portrait of a society that, often seen as fractured and fractious, is surprisingly unified and happy.
“Why are Israelis so damn happy?” So asked a commentator on Israeli life, who marveled that, given all the stresses they face in daily life—high prices, congested roads, the constant threat of terrorism and war—Israelis seem quite content. Senor and Singer, co-authors of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, examine some of the manifestations of this contentment. On average, Israelis live longer than almost anyone else in the world; they enjoy cradle-to-grave health care and other social services and are healthy overall; they’re well educated. Moreover, they’re far younger than the citizenry of most other developed countries—and, as the authors observe, “clearly, a country with more strollers than walkers has a different feel, energy, and excitement about the future.” Given the often-remarked penchant for pitched arguments, one might expect high levels of adrenaline and bile in the Israeli bloodstream, but those arguments are carried out with the expectation that they will end with handshakes. What accounts for all this amity? Fundamentally, as a small country, Israel fosters affinities: family, for sure, but also circles of connections at various intersections of life, people who are called hevre—something more than friends, constituting a social network that, one Israeli scholar remarks, “functions as almost a supra-family.” Consequently, the authors note, Israelis feel constant solidarity and do not feel alone, unlike so many solitary Americans, particularly among the elderly population. Granted, Senor and Singer acknowledge, there are outliers: the ultra-orthodox who want nothing to do with secular society, or the Arab Israelis who are not wholly part of the nation. For all that, though, “the culture of being together” makes a big difference.
A thought-provoking study that non-Israelis will find particularly fascinating.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781982115760
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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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