Lacks critical perspective, but patient readers will be fascinated.
Physicist turned travel writer Freely (Inside the Seraglio, not reviewed) counts three decades spent tracking down a 17th-century rabbi who became one of the most curious figures in the history of Judaism.
Figuratively walking the length and breadth of the Levant, the author initially neglects to ground his readers, preferring to mete out history piecemeal as he unfolds the story. But the essential facts congeal: hounded from Catholic Spain for a century, murdered in Catholic Poland, Jews from all over Europe found tolerance, security, and even comfort in the seats of power of the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, the mightiest Islamic kingdom ever known. Thus, in Izmir (Smyrna), a charismatic rabbinical student named Sabbatai Sevi proclaimed in 1648 that he had been anointed as Messiah, Redeemer, King of the Jews who would lead them back to the Holy Land. Given to both spiritual visions and unholy depressions, Sevi apparently had a riveting gaze and a melodious singing voice, and seems to have been regarded as something between a rock star and Bonnie Prince Charlie by Jews, Muslims, and gentiles alike. He rapidly gained both fanatic followers and powerful enemies, the latter primarily in the conservative orthodoxy, and no wonder: He constantly tinkered with the liturgy, flip-flopped feast days and fast days, blew away the Torah’s sexual prohibitions, and even encouraged women to peruse the holy writ, forbidden to them by tradition. As an ultimate outrage, Sevi readily embraced the Islamic faith under a sultan’s death threat, then blithely convinced members of his cult, known thereafter by the Turkish word for “turncoats,” that it was all part of God’s great plan for him. Remarkably, direct descendants of those Islamic, crypto-Jewish believers, ostracized and persecuted over three centuries, remain in a few distinct Levantine communities to the present day, and the author has visited several.
Lacks critical perspective, but patient readers will be fascinated.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-318-8
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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