A variegated amalgam of articles on the historical, theological, and artistic dimensions of Jerusalem. Rosovsky knows her Jerusalem: as a native, as the author of Jerusalemwalks and The Museums of Israel (not reviewed), and as a former curator at Harvard's Semitic Museum. If only she had expanded the city's chronology to a full-blown chapter, she could have prevented each contributor from reinventing the wheel of Jerusalem's long, checkered history. Three millennia of historical context is necessary for these articles on Jerusalem's demography, cartography, holy places, political profile, literature, and architecture. But the anthology's historical redundancy doesn't prevent F.E. Peters from speculating that King David built over Jebusite holy sites in Jerusalem, even though Judaism stands alone here as the only faith whose adherents did not (and cannot) build atop the ruins of churches or mosques. Muhammad Muslih does not attempt historical objectivity when he refers to the southern Syrians of centuries ago as Palestinians. Moreover, he refers to British and Jordanians in charge as ``rulers,'' while the Israelis are ``occupiers.'' In Jerusalem, politics and religion are intertwined, and the anthology's juxtaposed articles on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim views of the ``Heavenly City'' powerfully underline the different realities that each faith brings to these storied hills. The cited travel literature reveals that Jerusalem was visited throughout the centuries by Jews, despite the perils of religious animosities; by Christians, despite their religion's deemphasis of the Earthly Jerusalem; and by Muslims, despite the fact that Jerusalem is only their third holiest place. The writing here is tolerable, considering the academic credentials of the contributors. This collection might have been less cumbersome, but it's still a fitting trimillennial offering for the world's coffee table. (11 color, 66 b&w illustrations, 4 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-674-13190-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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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