A useful guide to a significant sporting event that was “born out of exclusion and anti-Semitism.”
The sports and features editor for the New Jersey Jewish News compiles a thorough history of a unique international sporting event.
Named after Judas Maccabi, “perhaps the mightiest warrior in Jewish history,” the Maccabi sports clubs sprouted in Europe during the late 19th century in imitation of student organizations from which Jews were excluded. Fueled by the Zionist movement and dedicated to resuscitating the “muscular Judaism” of ancient times, the Maccabiah Games held its first international competition, modeled on the Olympics, in British-ruled Palestine in 1932. Kaplan (501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die, 2013) begins with that event in Tel Aviv and chronicles, in short chapters, all 19 of the Maccabiah through 2013, highlighting team results and outstanding individual achievements. Certain themes repeatedly pop up: the persistent money problems, difficulties in the early years with transportation and food, and the games’ increasing expansion and prestige. Other chapters feature unusual events unique to a particular Maccabiah, like the catastrophic footbridge collapse in 1997 or the exasperating NCAA interference on an athlete eligibility issue in 1969. Though Kaplan focuses mainly on the peaceful competition among the world’s Jewish athletes, he adverts throughout to the shifting global and regional scenes, the complex politics, wars, atrocities, boycotts, and terrorism. He also enlivens the narrative with numerous sidebars on individual athletes, some well-known (gymnast Mitch Gaylord, basketball player Ernie Grunfeld) and some stars of such lesser-known sports as judo, fencing, or tenpin bowling. Kaplan’s style is straightforward and upbeat, and he is insistent on the games’ importance and the inspiration they have offered. Sports fans will likely most enjoy the more unusual profiles, including the player who turned his back on the NBA to play for the Israeli national team or the gold medal swimmer who returned to the games 20 years later as a rabbi and spiritual consultant to the American team.
A useful guide to a significant sporting event that was “born out of exclusion and anti-Semitism.”Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63220-494-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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