A collection of erudite and provocative essays that examine the synthesis of Jewish history and memory. Vidal-Naquet, an eminent French classicist, has a vision of history that is ``strictly antilyrical,'' with Thucydides and Proust representing dueling visions of memory and history. The essays stretch out over two millennia, from the fall of the Second Temple to Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre, with threads of zealotry and anti-Hellenism linking the extremities. The author emphasizes the Jewish civil wars of the period, reminding us how the Maccabean revolt against the Assyrian Greeks, too, began with internecine violence. The Qumram zealots who rejected a Hellenized Israel are compared to today's anti-Zionist Neture Karta sect of Hasidim. The collection's focus on memory versus history pits Josephus' practicality against the zealotry of Masada, just as the Warsaw Ghetto's historian, Emmanuel Ringelblum, is set off against its heroic warrior-suicide, Mordecai Anielewicz. If the book battles historical lyricism, it does so with lyrical statements like: ``Between time lost and time rediscovered lies the work of art. The challenge to which [Lanzmann's] Shoah subjects historians lies in the obligation it places on them to be at once scholars and artists.'' Vidal-Naquet lashes into Robert Faurisson's argument that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax, calling it so much ``intellectual excrement.'' But the historian of classics is on less certain ground in discussing Middle East affairs, with vapid comparisons of the massacres at Deir Yassin and Shatila-Sabra and pronouncements about Jerusalem being an Arab capital. The 42 pages of notes here attest to how well-rounded a scholar Vidal-Naquet is, but the collection leaves one with the feeling that he is a fine Jewish historian—for an authority on ancient Greece.
Pub Date: April 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-231-10208-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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 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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