Revealing and educational, Gavron's snapshot is a valuable account of a unique social movement. (Illustrated)
A seasoned Israeli journalist acts as guide on a tour of several kibbutzim—the communal settlements that held a powerful and unique place in the ideology of the maturing nation.
The kibbutz movement, born early in the 20th century in a few tents in a desolate landscape, was established in accord with the maxim "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" in an attempt to produce "a new human being." Gavron (Walking Through Israel, 1980) visits ten widely diverse settlements to encapsulate the history and present condition of the kibbutz movement. "No totalitarian regime," he says, "ever exercised such absolute control over its citizens as the free, voluntary, democratic kibbutz exercised over its members." Interviews with pioneers and veterans, their children and grandchildren, idealists and dissidents are quite revealing. Management of domestic life, work assignments, settlement business, child-rearing, social services, and community finances varies widely, from Degania (the original kibbutz) to Tammuz (a modern urban commune). Nine decades have wrought changes. Individualism is ascendant over idealism. As the nation develops, private property is gaining more importance on the kibbutzim—and the notion of "privatization" of budgets is coming to replace the ideal of each according to his needs. Most kibbutzim are mired in debt. The island communities have been under particular stress for the past 15 years or so because of dubious investments, political shifts, emigration, growing internal and external prosperity, and the simple passage of time. The subtitle is apt: the story of the kibbutz is evolving. Still, with only three percent of the population, the kibbutzim are responsible for seven percent of Israel's exports, ten percent of its industrial output, and forty percent of its agriculture. The egalitarian tradition isn't dead; it is maturing.
Revealing and educational, Gavron's snapshot is a valuable account of a unique social movement. (Illustrated)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8476-9526-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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