Were they essential to the war effort? Not as much as Lawrence, but it’s useful to hear about their accomplishments. A...
In which the British speak with forked tongues, and the Middle East is born.
Historian/novelist Florence’s (Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840, 2006, etc.) study of events in World War I operates from a ginned-up premise, since T. E. Lawrence—of Arabia, that is—and Aaron Aaronsohn and his wife Sarah, spies for England, never met or collaborated directly. “But,” he insists, “the lives of Aaron and Sarah Aaronson and T. E. Lawrence did streak across the same desert sky like blazing meteors, unexpected, blinding in their brilliance, demanding attention.” Even allowing for hyperbole, the defense is not convincing; Richard Meinertzhagen would have been the more appropriate pairing with the Aaronsohns, citizens of Ottoman-ruled Palestine who saw in the chaos of war and the Arab Revolt the chance to found a Jewish state. Aaron, scientifically trained and inclined, despised the Jewish population’s dependence on “corrupt Turkish authorities to maintain law and order,” but he was no bigot; his idea of that state seems to have included Arabs as well as Jews, all needing protection against “capitalistic exploitation.” Naturally, he cast his lot with the British, who were notably represented in the larger region by Major Lawrence, who was busily attacking Turkish outposts in the deserts of Arabia. The British did not quite deliver what Aaronsohn hoped for. About Lawrence, thanks in part to David Lean’s eponymous film, we know a great deal; Florence adds little to the mix. He does better with the little-known Aaronsohns, making a solid case for their importance in supplying critically important intelligence on Turkish defenses and the order of battle in Palestine—even though, as the martial novice Aaronsohn grumbled to his diary, “It is humiliating for an observing man of science to be…ignorant of war questions which he has always scorned and which, nevertheless, are today of such overwhelming influence in everybody’s life.”
Were they essential to the war effort? Not as much as Lawrence, but it’s useful to hear about their accomplishments. A serviceable book, but not much more.Pub Date: July 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06351-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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