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NOTES TO THE NATIONS

A LETTER TO ISRAEL

An often powerful work that offers a fresh, scripturally grounded assessment of Israel’s purpose.

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An open letter to Israel that urges its leaders to meditate deeply on the country’s holy mission.

In his debut, Clemans furnishes something rare, even for a more experienced writer: a mesmerizingly original, almost unclassifiable work. It’s addressed directly to the nation of Israel—an open letter that the author professes he was “compelled to write,” though he’s “neither a Jew nor an Israelite.” His message is both an admonition and a celebration of the historic purpose that he believes that God gave Israel. He provocatively considers the tension between the Jewish people’s “chosen” stature and the equality of all mankind. Although Israel biblically has a special relation to God, that designation is better understood as an obligation or mission, the author says, rather than a mark of privilege or superiority. The work is filled with timely reflections on the nature of biblical law, the relation between theology and evolutionary science, and the religious meaning of peace: “In spite of our past; in spite of what naysayers tell us today, and in spite of the uncertainties of tomorrow, world peace is possible to achieve,” Clemans writes. The book confronts head-on the challenge of modern Israel being surrounded by enemies, but Clemans exhorts the nation to respond with peace and love: “Acknowledge the hatred of those who hate you but do not stand against that hatred!” The book has a florid, sometimes poetic prose style that gives it a magnetic power but can also obscure the text’s overall clarity. And although the work is peppered with meticulously documented direct quotes from the Bible, its unsystematic consideration of the references’ contexts undermines its scholarly rigor. That said, the work remains a stirring appeal for Israel to ponder its role as a world leader as well as a reflection on the insuperable limitations of all worldly projects.

An often powerful work that offers a fresh, scripturally grounded assessment of Israel’s purpose.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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