by Michael Bar-Zohar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 1996
An unconvincing attempt to link cosmetic giant L'OrÇal's alleged obeisance to the Arab boycott of Israel to French wartime collaboration with the Nazis. A recent Israeli magazine included a two-page ad from Paris-based L'OrÇal headlined ``Beauty Without Boundaries.'' It was typical of dozens of such ads in the past year, apparently calculated to repair the damage done by the company's long-alleged illegal cooperation with the Syrian-based office that decides which companies should be boycotted in the Arab world for doing business with Israel. Journalist, novelist, and one-time Israeli Knesset member Bar-Zohar (Brothers, 1993, etc.) escalates the PR war, first by attempting to nail L'OrÇal on the boycott issue with a mountain of evidence, and then by attacking the company for employing several men with alleged ties to France's WW II collaborationist government. But the absence of footnotes makes it impossible to judge the reliability of his evidence in this matter. And the book's sensationalistic style only serves to cloud the issues. Bar- Zohar's apparently heavy reliance on the brothers Jean and David Frydman as sources further damages the book's credibility. Jean Frydman has dual Israeli-French citizenship and was allegedly removed from the board of a L'OrÇal subsidiary to comply with the Arab boycott. The Frydmans and L'OrÇal are engaged in numerous suits and countersuits, and, in the absence of detailed sourcing, there is no way of judging the credibility of their allegations. Bar-Zohar cites enough documentation to make many of his unsavory broadsides against L'OrÇal stick, but he offers absolutely no evidence to connect the war records of L'OrÇal officers to actions taken 40 years later. Bar-Zohar apparently expects readers to assume that yesterday's collaborationists would rather do business with Arabs than Jews. Such unsubstantiated charges smack more of smear than revelation. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94068-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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