This firsthand account of the Jewish community of Cochin, a town on the southwestern coast of India, fails to live up to its potential. The Cochin Jews have a wealth of tradition and folklore abounding in ghosts and spirits, as well as a caste system nearly as rigid as that of mainstream Indian society. Daniel was born in 1912 to a well-educated, middle-class family and received a good education. She served briefly in the Royal Indian Navy during WW II and had a solid career in the civil service before moving to a kibbutz in Israel, where she continues to reside today. Unfortunately, her story is a personal tale completely dependent on the telling for its interest. Penned by a competent stylist, it might have been vastly entertaining, but coauthor Johnson (Anthropology/Ithaca Coll.), who tape-recorded and arranged the conversations in which Daniel recalled her past, has been no help at all in giving them literary shape and texture. The setting is exotic; the folklore could have lent these reminiscences a Garc°a M†rquezlike quality. But Daniel is anything but a natural storyteller: Her tale is overly episodic and unfocused; her language harsh and unmusical. As a historical narrative, Daniel's account is unconvincing because of her many grievances. Much of the text is devoted to denouncing her hometown's haughty ``white Jews,'' who scorned Daniel's own family as the descendants of slave women, and to tooting her ancestral horn. She also spends a fair amount of time criticizing the irreligious members of her kibbutz. For Daniel, this grumping may have been a therapeutic exercise; for the reader, it's merely tiresome. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8276-0539-0
Page Count: 204
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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