Sound, sober historical documentation.
A British historian presents a pointedly argued account of the relentless violence by both British and Jewish groups that brought about the end of British rule in Palestine.
Using the example of the abduction and murder of 16-year-old activist Alexander Rubowitz on May 6, 1947, Cesarani (History/Royal Holloway, Univ. of London; Becoming Eichmann, 2006, etc.) shows how British counterinsurgency measures not only failed to gain control of Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine in the mid-1940s, but essentially provoked such a violent backlash that the British recognized the game was up. Rubowitz, who was hanging posters in a neighborhood of Jerusalem for the terrorist group LEHI (aka the Stern Gang), was bundled into a car by men in civilian clothes, one of whom dropped a hat. When Rubowitz did not return home, the family broadcast his disappearance, and the hat was traced to former World War II war hero, now deputy superintendent of police, Major Roy Farran. There ensued feeble attempts at obfuscation and cover-up on the part of the British Army, who were apprised by Farran’s account and others involved that Rubowitz had been tortured to death and his body vanished. Although Farran was clearly implicated, he was allowed to elude justice even after his court martial, and he was later celebrated in England. Cesarani combs through the bloody history of the British in the region, the early Zionist movement and push for Jewish migration and the Jewish retaliation against British resistance to increased migration after WWII. In this dense but cogent work, the author demonstrates how the British “special squads” descended into criminality—and were matched in their militancy by Jewish groups such as the Irgun.
Sound, sober historical documentation.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-306-81845-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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