An eye-opening look at an Eden of eco-villages gradually giving way to economic exigencies.
A personal journey back to the kibbutz of the author’s youth prompts an examination of the larger reasons for the Israeli disenchantment with the pioneering enterprise.
In 1988, suffering a broken heart and at odds about what to do with his life, Canadian journalist Leach (Journalism and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of Victoria, BC; Fatal Tide: When the Race of a Lifetime Goes Wrong, 2008, etc.), who is not Jewish, ventured to Israel to work on a kibbutz to experience communal living and hard farm labor. He ended up at the Shamir kibbutz and stayed for eight months as a volunteer in a commune of 500 people, working for his room and board and laboring at various tasks in the kitchen and on the grounds. Upon his return to Israel 20 years later, now a middle-aged father with children, Leach found enormous changes—not only to Shamir, which had embraced privatization in the mid-2000s and listed its Optical Industry on NASDAQ, but the whole kibbutz (“gathering”) system, largely privatized out of economic necessity. Since the establishment of the first kibbutz in the early 1900s, the grass-roots experiment has been envisioned as a “collective paradise for an evolved human species,” a utopian vision of absolute equality derived from ideals by Leo Tolstoy and first implemented by Zionist philosopher Aaron David Gordon. Although Gordon believed that Jewish immigrants could live peaceably with their Arab neighbors, as Leach learned, many kibbutzim were built on land confiscated from the Arabs with the establishment of Israel in 1948. Moreover, from Shamir to other kibbutzim Leach visited across the country, the communes had moved from “hard socialism to soft capitalism” with the advent of the Likud Party in 1977. Leach’s report is both affectingly personal, delving into many intimate stories of visionaries, and a sound historical study.
An eye-opening look at an Eden of eco-villages gradually giving way to economic exigencies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77041-340-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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