A passable study of biblical history and comparative mythology.
One of the “enduring motifs underlying Western views of the wider world” gets a scholarly assessment, thanks to British journalist Parfitt.
The myth of the Lost Tribes of Israel has its origins deep in Jewish antiquity, writes Parfitt: the restructuring of the tribes of the “twelve sons of Jacob” and the division of Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms, followed by the Assyrian invasions of 732 and 721 b.c. and, two centuries later, the removal of much of the southern kingdom to exile in Babylon and eventual assimilation into the Assyrian population. “This is the point,” Parfitt writes, “at which the history of the Lost Tribes of Israel stops and the history of the myth of the Lost Tribes starts.” The psalmists’ laments for lost cousins gave way in time to reports by Jewish travelers, filed from such places as Yemen and Tunisia, with secondhand sightings of Hebrew speakers living far from their brethren; one such report, from the ninth century, promises that the children of the lost tribes “never die in the lifetime of their parents,” while the adults are “warlike, Spartan in their habits, and wealthy.” This comforting view gave way to a modification of the myth in Christian hands, whereby the lost tribes were now the savages that European travelers encountered along their way; Torquemada, for instance, explained the great temples of Mesoamerica as structures modeled on the altars of Jerusalem, while Diego Durán was certain that the Aztecs had to be Jews, considering their “rites and superstitions, their omens and false dealings.” This strange Other was further transformed in the 19th century, when Joseph Smith founded Mormonism on the notion that the lost tribes had somehow got to America. The myth continues to be modified today, Parfitt writes, as the descendants of converts to Judaism turn up in places like Myanmar and Ethiopia.
A passable study of biblical history and comparative mythology.Pub Date: May 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-84212-665-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Phoenix/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
HISTORY | JEWISH | 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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