by Michael Sfard translated by Maya Johnston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2018
A moving, well-documented testimony to lawyers’ tireless battles against a nation’s inhumanity.
A Tel Aviv–based human rights lawyer forcefully argues that Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is equivalent to apartheid.
Sfard, who represents Palestinian victims of civil rights violations, makes his literary debut with an unsparing indictment of Israeli racism, oppression, and injustice. Drawing on case documents and interviews with lawyers, peace activists, and human rights workers, he chronicles the legal battles in which he and his colleagues have been engaged: deportation; the construction of Jewish settlements, separation barriers, and unauthorized outposts; use of torture in interrogations; imposition of administrative detention; demolition of homes of families of suspected terrorists; and “targeted killings” or assassinations. The author fervently believes that litigation is a tool for social change, although the complexities of legal struggles sometimes make it difficult to know how to measure success: “The effect that litigation has on politics, on the media, and on social perceptions means that the judicial rulings…are only one element in the matrix of litigation’s outcomes.” Sometimes, remedy for his client grants legitimacy and positive publicity for the occupier; in other cases, achieving justice for a client has an impact on broader policy decisions; and, most ambitiously, legal fights may change the nation’s moral and ethical values. Israeli settlements clearly violate international laws of occupation, which hold that the occupied population must “resume their normal lives as much as possible.” Nevertheless, Israel continues to seize Palestinian land, arguing that the nation is not building new settlements but merely expanding those already established. Furthermore, Israeli courts repeatedly insist that settlements, barriers, torture, and killings are justified because of security needs. Palestinian villagers cut off from their farms, parents unable to take a sick child to a doctor, tankers barred from delivering water: all these result from draconian rules of entry. The “security charade,” Sfard asserts, continues to serve Israel “in its quest for a belligerent, unilateral solution to its conflict with the Palestinians” and gives its courts “standing and legitimacy in world opinion.”
A moving, well-documented testimony to lawyers’ tireless battles against a nation’s inhumanity.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12270-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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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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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