An essential work of modern history: put it alongside Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers and Amos Elon’s more recent The...
An ambitious, thoroughly accessible account of the so often unhappy fortunes of the Jewish people from the early modern era to the present.
In the late 18th century, writes Sachar (History/George Washington Univ.; Dreamland, 2002, etc.), many of the states and principalities of Europe were faced with a difficult decision: their rulers and peoples may have despised the much-maligned Jews hidden away by night in their prisonlike ghettoes, but they needed their “talent for producing liquid wealth” if their economies were to enter the modern age. Religious fanaticism was becoming a thing of the past, which cooled some of the anti-Semitic ardor of both Catholic and Protestant realms, and in the next few years Jews became able to travel freely, live where they wished and even attend public schools and universities—all quite astonishing changes, given past repression. Among the results were the rapid growth of a Jewish middle class, the arrival into France and Germany of a large population of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the dispersal of Jews to the New World; in the last regard, Sachar notes that whereas the British crown imposed plenty of restrictions on Catholics, “not a single law was enacted in British North America specifically to penalize Jews.” Elsewhere that was not true, and by the end of the 1800s, Pope Leo XIII was publicly supporting “the anti-Semitic movement as long as it is carried out in a legal fashion, as in Germany.” Sachar charts these changing sentiments, offering exact and lucid précis of such transformative events as the Dreyfus Affair and the rise of organized, officially ordained anti-Semitism across Europe (and, in response, the rise of Zionism). Moving from continent to continent over time, Sachar brings his account to the post-9/11 world, with anti-Jewish sentiment again on the rise in Europe thanks not only to homegrown fascists but also to an ever-growing Muslim population, itself marginalized.
An essential work of modern history: put it alongside Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers and Amos Elon’s more recent The Pity of It All.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41497-5
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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