A frightening photograph of a mutable demon so many fail to recognize and continue to embrace.
Anti-Semitism is more pervasive, dangerous and deadly than ever before, writes the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
Former Harvard professor Goldhagen (Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, 2009), who has also written about the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holocaust (A Moral Reckoning, 2002), comes out swinging in this frontal assault on anti-Semitism and its practitioners and does not pause for breath until the final page, where he offers a feeble defense against the formidable juggernaut he describes: “People of good conscience unite….” Although his arguments and evidence are at times repetitive, they are never redundant. The author begins with the origins of anti-Semitism, then examines its singularity (it is unlike any other prejudice at large today), its omnipresence in contemporary culture (Mel Gibson makes a cameo) and even lists a number of literary all-stars who have embraced and/or furthered its foul agenda (Chaucer, Voltaire and Eliot among them). Goldhagen then describes what he calls the “antisemitic paradigm,” offering a list of defining characteristics. He traces the history of anti-Semitism in Christian history (from the Crusades to the enduring beliefs about “Christ-killing” and the blood libel), then argues that the sympathy accorded the Jews following the Holocaust has been abating in recent years. Other major topics include the relationship between anti-Israel positions and anti-Semitism (they are inextricably linked, he says), the political and religious motives of anti-Semitism in Arab and Muslim states, and the spread of anti-Semitism to the United Nations and to NGOs. Among his most alarming sections are those devoted to the viral spread of anti-Semitism via the Internet, social and news media. Most of the illustrations he reproduces (political cartoons, quotations from politicians) are horrifying to contemplate. Repeatedly he wonders: How can so few people generate such pervasive hostility?
A frightening photograph of a mutable demon so many fail to recognize and continue to embrace.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-09787-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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