One-stop shopping for tourists, graduate students, and Sunday school teachers seeking reliable historical information.
A reference guide to the Holy Land offers up-to-date scholarship to a general readership.
Williamson (Emeritus, Hebrew/Oxford Univ.; He Has Shown You What is Good: Old Testament Justice Then and Now, 2012, etc.) and Hoyland (Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History/New York Univ. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World; In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, 2014, etc.) have assembled a series of essays about the so-called “Holy Land”—the editors explain their choice of that term in the thoughtful introduction. Most of the essays focus on a particular chronological slice, including the history of Israel, from its earliest moments through the fourth century B.C.E. Yale Divinity School professor John J. Collins overviews the Hellenistic and Roman periods, introducing several men who participated in resistance movements—e.g., Simon, a servant of King Herod whose friends and followers declared him king (he was beheaded). Men like Simon, writes Collins, provide important context for considering “the career of Jesus.” Collins concludes by correcting widespread assumptions about the rise of rabbinic Judaism. Ancient history professor Konstantin Klein shows how Christian clergymen and theologians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries thought about the land of Jesus’ birth. Very early in the life of the church, influential writers discouraged Christians from traveling to Jerusalem, since “going to the Holy Land would involve stays in guest houses, inns, and taverns, generally perceived as hotbeds of sin.” But in time, clergymen began to self-consciously “promote” the idea of a “Christian Holy Land.” Other essays consider the history of Muslims in the Holy Land and the Crusades. The chronological survey ends in the early 20th century (the volume avoids controversies about the modern state of Israel), and three thematic essays—addressing pilgrimage, sacred space, and Scripture—round out the volume. Especially welcome is the discussion of Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage, which have generally received less attention than Christian pilgrimage.
One-stop shopping for tourists, graduate students, and Sunday school teachers seeking reliable historical information.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-872439-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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