Timely, given the recent swell of xenophobia in France, and a useful supplement to standard histories of the episode, such...
Liberty, equality, and fraternity? For everyone but Jews—as much of France strenuously believed a century ago, according to this provocative study of anti-Semitism.
Birnbaum (Political Philosophy/the Sorbonne) is not a historian as such; as he writes at the outset, “this tour of anti-Semitic France turns its back on meticulous research methods, on the desire to explain, to choose the sample with great care, with the goal of providing proof, quantifying, demonstrating how the variables were constructed, and reaching definitive conclusions.” He adds, sounding a bit like Inspector Clouseau, “I shall build my account on everything and on nothing.” Fortunately, there’s plenty of that everything in Birnbaum’s pages, as he turns over archive after archive to reconstruct how ordinary French people behaved during the shameful, 12-year Dreyfus Affair and the subsequent persecution of Dreyfus’s renowned defender, the novelist Émile Zola. In the main, the French people, he writes, responded badly, taking the occasion of the charge that French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus had spied for the Germans to initiate anti-Semitic demonstrations—and, in some cases, anti-Semitic violence—throughout the nation. Vigorous protests swept through Paris early in 1898, he writes, with cries of “Out with Zola! Death to the Jews! Death to the Yids! Long live the army!” These protests spread quickly to every corner of the country, so that even in rural villages, newspapers were printing scurrilous warnings of this ilk: “Beware, all Jews of Feverney and Jussey, if you do not want to be scalded alive like the animals whose flesh you refuse to eat.” In time, writes Birnbaum, this vicious outpouring ebbed—thanks in at least some measure to the behavior of the national police, who, while no friend of the Jews, took its responsibility to uphold the law seriously. Anti-Semitic sentiment remained, however, to find new and deadly expression with the arrival of fascism three decades later.
Timely, given the recent swell of xenophobia in France, and a useful supplement to standard histories of the episode, such as Jean-Denis Bredin’s The Affair.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8090-6501-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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