Spirited prose and often entertaining personal testimonies can’t save an uneven narrative that too often lapses into bland...
Repetitious history of a vanishing community.
The title refers to the fewer than 50 remaining Jews living in the province of Kerala, on India’s tropical southwest shores. The Paradesi, or “white” Jews, live in Mattancherry; across the river at Ernakulam live the Malabari, or “black” Jews. Both groups’ ancestries date as far back as the great Jewish Diaspora of 70 CE. For centuries these Jews prospered in religiously tolerant India, playing important parts in business and at court, until their numbers grew to thousands. The crux of the story, writes journalist Fernandes (Holy Warriors: A Journey Into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism, 2007), is the long-running argument between the white and black Jews regarding who arrived in Kerala first; this has made all the difference as the community nears extinction. The author chronicles soured relations between black and white, the establishment of an apartheid system and the interbreeding that prevented the maintenance of a “pure” Jewish community. Fernandes’s attempt to depict their demise as tragic is unpersuasive. As one elder Paradesi summed up, “Now after the others left, gone to Israel, gone overseas, or just gone—the Kashmiris, the Muslims, the Christians have come.” This is the oft-told story of many small towns: The younger generation was no longer committed to living in a backwater, upholding traditions of the older generation just to keep the town alive. Furthermore, there is nothing “forgotten” about the Kerala Jews’ story. Political and spiritual world leaders have walked down their dusty streets for decades, visiting the enclave in a show of homage to the ancients who succeeded handsomely, but whose time has gone. The book degenerates into a series of interviews in which anecdotal evidence, opinion, rumor and redacted history supersede thoughtful accounting.
Spirited prose and often entertaining personal testimonies can’t save an uneven narrative that too often lapses into bland travelogue.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60239-267-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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