A meandering account that will appeal mainly to readers sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
A left-leaning Canadian journalist and filmmaker talks to grassroots peace and human-rights activists in Palestine and Israel.
“In cultures that glorify war, the voices of authentic peace-makers are seldom heard,” writes Riordon (An Authorized Biography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines, 2005, etc.), who traveled extensively throughout Israel and Palestine to interview more than 60 individuals—both Israelis and Palestinians—working for peace. In particular, he set out to learn how activists imagine building a “just peace,” which he defines vaguely as one that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to live as equals, with Israel presumably making concessions regarding borders, divisions of the land and the right of return of Palestinian refugees. In a statement reflecting the views of many quoted here, one Palestinian says: “We have to find some way to live together—without walls. To do this there are only two choices, one state or two. But Israel refuses both.” Riordon describes the motivations, work and hopes of disparate activists, including Meir Margalit, an Israeli politician who works through the Jerusalem Council to improve life for Palstinians; Dror Etkes, a human-rights worker helping Palestinians recover land taken from them to build Israeli settlements; and Salah Haj Yihyeh, manager of a Physicians for Human Rights mobile clinic that provides medical care in refugee camps. Many of the interviewees work through such organizations as Peace Now, Israel’s oldest peace movement; New Profile, which supports people refusing to serve in the Israeli military; and Zochrot, a group of Israelis that posts signs in places where Palestinian villages once existed. While all are deeply committed to solidarity with Palestinians, most confess to being pessimistic about the future. A bridge to peace is still possible, but “it is small, narrow, and weak,” says one activist.
A meandering account that will appeal mainly to readers sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-778-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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