Textually dense at times but effectively highlights the left-right division that is splitting much of the world.
The considerable effects of literature, music (popular and classical), and other arts on Americans’ attitudes about Israel.
Goldman (Religion/Middlebury Coll.; Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern Jewish Identity: Seven Twentieth-Century Converts, 2015, etc.) delivers a studied and sturdy look at what the subtitle promises. He also inserts elements of memoir, describing his youthful experiences in Israel, his time in the military there, and some negative reactions to his writing and talks about Israel’s rightward turn. (He is deeply concerned about the rise of the right and American evangelicals’ unquestioning support for it.) Although artists and their works are his principal focus, Goldman does not assume that readers know the history of the Middle East from the early 19th century. Consequently, in each chapter, he includes historical background of each period he discusses across the chronological narrative. We revisit the Ottoman Empire, the founding of the country after World War II, the Six-Day War, Camp David, the various Israeli political leaders throughout the decades—and much more. As a result, his discussions of the artists sometimes slip into the swelling undergrowth. He tells stories about Herman Melville—who visited the Middle East after the publication of Moby-Dick; the result of that journey was Clarel, his “book-length poem based on his Holy Land experiences”—and Mark Twain, whose travels, chronicled in The Innocents Abroad, 1869, began his rocket ride into international celebrity. Throughout, Goldman explores the works of a variety of luminaries, including Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, John Steinbeck, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, W.H. Auden, Johnny Cash, Madonna, and numerous others. But he also informs us about lesser-known events and people—e.g., the Adams Colony (1866), the building of the YMCA in Jerusalem (1933), and the life of Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes. Near the end, he has some critical words for Donald Trump.
Textually dense at times but effectively highlights the left-right division that is splitting much of the world.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4696-5241-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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