A moving and original contribution to an inexhaustible body of literature.
A spiritual examination focuses on the terrible toll the Holocaust took on its survivors.
Debut author Korman Mains’ parents were both decisively shaped by the horror of the Holocaust. Her mother, Masza Goldblum, was born and raised in Poland, and when the Nazis invaded in 1939, her family was forced into a crowded ghetto—and her brother was summarily shot. The survivors were then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Goldblum’s mother was gassed. From there, Goldblum was shipped to a concentration camp for women, before being liberated in 1945. The author’s father, Szapsa Korman, avoided imprisonment in the camps, but lost his first wife and much of his family. Korman Mains grew up under the dark specter of her parents’ tormented past—both were generally aloof and somewhat inscrutable. While many wondered how such a tragedy could occur, the author wrestled with the 20th century’s central catastrophe from a different vantage point: Could its victims meaningfully recover? In 1971, she attended a seminar led by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan exile; he introduced her to the therapeutic power of meditation and to a philosophical perspective that helped her begin to divine an answer to this question. She learned that the cosmos is characterized by a “basic goodness,” a moral health, and even the worst transgressions occur within the horizon of this elemental humaneness. The author, armed with years of spiritual practice, traveled to Poland to find healing for herself and maybe some wisdom to share with other Jews about the restoration of this basic goodness. In this poignant account that features family photographs, Korman Mains intelligently discusses the resistance of her family to Buddhist spirituality—for her parents, one’s Jewish identity was nonnegotiable. Therefore, the historical suffering of the Jews must be managed only by loyal Jews. The author recalls: “The irony was that doing nothing to engage with Judaism made me a good Jew simply by default. But searching to understand my own and others’ suffering with the help of Buddhist meditation made me disloyal and a bad Jew.” Her story is a heart-rending one, and provides a fresh take not only on the Holocaust, but also the proper response to the seemingly inerasable stain left by profound anguish. The narrative does tend, though, to meander somewhat shiftlessly—the author reproduces long excerpts from her uncle’s memoir.
A moving and original contribution to an inexhaustible body of literature.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 318
Publisher: West Lake Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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