An overly brief, dryly informative history or the world’s fifth largest Jewish community (after the US, Israel, Russia, and Ukraine). The strong suits of Benbassa (Jewish history/Paris IV-Sorbonne; Hahn Nahum: A Sepharilic Chief Rabbi in Politics, 1892-1923, etc.) are social and institutional history. She provides the reader with a wealth of statistics on such matters as French-Jewish demography, vocational and class structure, and fertility rates. Benbassa also writes well about the strongly regional nature of French-Jewish history, at least until Napoleonic reforms began to unify the community in the early nineteenth century. During the first two years of the French Revolution, for instance, she shows how the Sephardic Jews of the southeast were granted basic civic rights before their Ashkenazic brethren in the areas north and east of Paris. Finally, Benbassa does an excellent job of explaining how important French-Jewish intellectuals developed a strongly integrationist, but not assimilationist, doctrine known as “Franco-Judaism” and of discussing the death and life of French Jews during the Holocaust (about three-quarters survived). However, this book is far too brief for its subject—the first signs of French Jewry go back to the fourth century—and its pacing is highly uneven. Again, while there are long lists of prominent Jews in modern France’s business and professional life, religious, cultural and intellectual life generally are given short shrift. For example, although Benbassa devotes several pages to Jews active in the Left during the late 1960s, there is only one sentence on the great Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas, perhaps the most influential Jewish thinker of the post-Holocaust period. Finally, a number of important facts and quotations, such as de Gaulle’s oft-quoted, oft-criticized 1967 statement that the Jews comprise “an elite people, sure of itself and domineering,” are relegated to endnotes. Benbassa’s history, then, informs the way most encyclopedia entries do: It is helpfully fact-laden, but its lack of sparkle—particularly the absence of memorable anecdotes and quotations—leaves the reader hungry for a more colorful history.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-691-05984-5
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
