Whitfield (American Studies/Brandeis; A Death in the Delta: The Life of Emmett Till, 1988) examines the complex interplay between Jewish newcomers to the US and the culture they helped shape. Whitfield states his central concern early in this volume: “The United States may be the site . . . that has most fully tested the category of Jew. . . .‘’ Although the Jewish presence in America is nearly 350 years old, Jews did not come to the US in significant numbers until the 1880s when the first influx from eastern Europe arrived. At the turn of the century, Jewish- American institutions experienced an explosive period of growth, and the Jewish influence in American culture became widespread, far beyond the tiny size of the Jewish-American community. There is “no epicenter of American Jewish culture,” as Whitfield notes, yet Jews have dominated many areas of American culture, most prominently Hollywood, the musical theater, and, in this century, literature. Whitfield’s thesis is as complex, multifaceted, and polyvalent as the Jewish-American experience itself. He sidesteps the more heavily trod fields of film and literature to focus on music, theater, and the Jewish-American reaction to issues of race and the Holocaust. The book suggests that while the Jewish contribution to American culture has been a central one—perhaps second only to that of African-Americans in this century—the reverse has been less true, with the greater freedom and security of America having a deleterious effect on Jewish identity. He is hardly the first to make that observation. Nor is he the first to argue that a stronger faith component to Jewish-American identity is all that stands between the community and an eventual evaporation into the American ether. But he makes his case wittily. In Search suffers a bit from a ramshackle structure, but the author pulls the threads of his themes together convincingly in the book’s final chapter. If readers can stay with him that long, they may be rewarded for the effort.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-754-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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