A provocative mixture of scholarship, sly observation and wry writing that often glistens.
An Israeli novelist father (Scenes from Village Life, 2012, etc.) and historian daughter (Israelis in Berlin, 2001, etc.) argue that words are the most crucial ingredients in the long history of Jewish culture.
In a tone that is genial and modest, father and daughter—both professors (Literature/Ben Gurion Univ., and History/Univ. of Haifa, respectively)—only occasionally disagree in this disquisition about the significance and relationship of words, history, religion and culture. After establishing their fundamental and shared beliefs—they are secular Jews who value the Bible not for its historical or religious meanings but for “its splendor as literature”—they establish their thesis (the printed word has unified and identified Jews) and begin marshaling support. They talk about the importance of the “teacher-parent module” in Jewish families and traditions, recognize that debate and dispute are part of the reading process, and repeatedly state that the fiction of the Bible communicates great human truths. As the authors recount various Bible tales in support of their thesis, they devote an entire chapter to powerful and otherwise significant women (from Eve to Tamar), and they note how swiftly, once liberated, Jewish women rose in academe. Another compelling section deals with the concept of time (cyclical, linear), and the authors declare that Jews have their “backs to the future and [their] faces toward the past.” They also deal with the term “Judaism,” observing that it began as a term of opprobrium before it became more common, and they note the immense significance of individual names in the Bible.
A provocative mixture of scholarship, sly observation and wry writing that often glistens.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-15647-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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