A spirited defense and a plea to both Arabs and Jews, “motivated by the same humanism yet situated on opposite sides of the...
A scholarly reappraisal of the diverse Arab responses to the Holocaust and Zionism.
In the wake of recent scandalous proclamations by Holocaust deniers, Beirut-born historian Achcar (Development Studies and International Relations/School of Oriental and African Studies, London; The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder, 2006, etc.) is distressed by the evidence of Arab “intellectual regression.” Examining the archives—he takes English-language “experts” to task for not learning Arabic—from the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s through the eras of Nasser, the PLO and the present-day efflorescence of Islamic fundamentalism, the author emphasizes that the Arab response has involved an enormously convoluted “symbolic tit for tat” over the centuries, stating, in effect, that the Jewish people are not the only victims, and refusing to be saddled with the responsibility for what was in fact a Christian evil. Achcar repeatedly stresses that “the Arabs” do not act in unison, but are diverse peoples, and as such there is no single response. In terms of the reaction to the Zionist incursions in Palestine and increased immigration during the ’30s and ’40s, he carefully distinguishes among four groups of Arabs: the liberal Westerners, the Marxists, the nationalists and the reactionary/fundamentalist Pan-Islamists. Achcar acknowledges the bad apples over the decades—e.g., the pro-Nazi Baath Party and Amin al-Husseini, aka the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—while much of this record continues to play into “the stock themes of Israeli propaganda” by the Zionist state. At times the author scrambles to portray the Arab reaction in a favorable light, but he does a fine service pointing out holes in previous research. Moreover, he never loses sight of the irony that Israel is widely regarded as a racist state.
A spirited defense and a plea to both Arabs and Jews, “motivated by the same humanism yet situated on opposite sides of the wall of hatred.”Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8954-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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