Effectively argued, though the reader may pause to wonder how the Falashas are doing today.
Suspenseful true tale of how the Falashas of Ethiopia were ransomed from a latter-day pharaoh.
A century and a half ago, British missionaries reported that they had come across a curious spectacle in the high plateau country of northern Ethiopia: an isolated black tribe whose people kept kosher, observed Levitican constraints about menstruation and circumcision, and in every other possible way were observant Jews. Removed from their fellow Jews for hundreds of years, these Falashas (the name means “stranger” in Amharic) nonetheless harbored dreams of returning to Israel. Enter debut author Naim, Israel’s ambassador to Ethiopia in 1990, the year that what would come to be called Operation Solomon occurred. Having arranged the similar ransom of Soviet Jews via Finland, Naim now faced the considerable resistance of Ethiopian dictator Megistu Miriam, who reminded Naim (with some reason) that every Ethiopian had cause to clamor for return to Israel, inasmuch as every Ethiopian was a Jew before converting to Christianity way back in the fourth century. (“He’s a stupid man,” Naim remarked of Mengistu to a colleague. “How did he come to power?” Replied the colleague, “He killed everyone who was in his way.”) American Jews raised $35 million in only three days, Israel made several political concessions, and Naim secured the release of the Falashas from Ethiopia. But the Falashas encountered unforeseen difficulties with integrating into Israeli society, in particular scarcely concealed hostility on the part of the right wing and a general fear of contamination by AIDS or tuberculosis. So chilly was the reception that many older Falashas wanted to return to Ethiopia, jeopardizing Naim’s work—and his carefully constructed argument before the United Nations that the Falashas’ case should “erase the hideous UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.” For all the problems, however, he still views Operation Solomon as a success.
Effectively argued, though the reader may pause to wonder how the Falashas are doing today.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45081-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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 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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