A newspaperman’s sharp focus and beveled prose lend emotional power to this debate.
A great admirer of Israel’s self-realization sees inherent contradiction and impending disaster.
Washington Post columnist Cohen walks readers through Israel’s history of enormous accomplishment and unlikely creation and concludes that its survival is tenuous. Emerging as “the product of history’s most murderous century,” Israel was an “honest mistake,” Cohen wrote in a 2006 column—by which he meant that its creation was not a fault but a naïve dream to think that it would be accepted nestled among hostile neighbors resentful of its success and bent on its destruction. Cohen looks at some of the essential facts propelling Israel’s creation: The “crushing affliction” of being a Jew that founder Theodor Herzl wrote about in 1880s Vienna would not go away by converting; instead, it culminated in relentless anti-Semitism and pogroms and underscored his dictum that the greater the concentration of Jews, the more anti-Semitism. While the Holocaust provided the powerful impetus for the creation of Israel, Cohen reminds us of the anti-Jewish fever that occurred before and after—e.g., in America, where his own ancestors migrated from Poland in the early 1920s. Ironically, considering the forces against Israel, even militant Jewish leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky, father of what became the right-wing Likud party, did not advocate for “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians; instead, a defensive strategy Jabotinsky called an “iron wall” was erected, all hinging, presciently, on “the Arabs’ relationship to Zionism.” Moreover, considering its hostile ethnic minority, displacement of the imperiled Mizrahi community (Jews in Arab lands), growing numbers of ultraorthodox and global indifference (in the United States, “more than half of all Jews marry a non-Jew”), Israel “has run out of purpose.”
A newspaperman’s sharp focus and beveled prose lend emotional power to this debate.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1416575689
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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