A fluent, personal account of the role of Italian Jews in the making of modern Europe.
Acceptance, then persecution.
Most Americans think of Jewish culture as Northern and Eastern European: Yiddish language and heavy soups. This book reminds us that Italy had sustained a rich and vibrant Jewish community since ancient Roman times. It writes a history of Jewish life when ghettos arose and when the pope had power over lands and peoples beyond the Vatican. The real heart of the book, though, is the “golden age,” from the reforms of the revolution of 1848 until the Fascist crackdowns of 1938. During these 90 years, Jews moved relatively freely along city streets and through the country’s governments and universities. Fascinating is the story of Ernesto Nathan, Rome’s mayor from 1907 to 1913. “Nathan was a Jewish, London-born, German-fathered, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy’s Masonic Lodge,” writes Segrè, the author of five books on the history of science. “Serving for six years, longer than any mayor before or since, many also think he was the best mayor Rome has ever had.” Fascinating, too, are the lives of the merchants and their daughters who became the currency of social advancement through assimilation and marriage. Most riveting is the story of the author’s immediate family, among them one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, the Nobel Prize–winning Emilio Segrè. It is a family, too, of artists and teachers, small-town merchants and big-time machers. History is written here by men and women who take advantage of new freedoms and, by the 1930s, find their ways among old prejudices. Jewish Italians served their nation in many ways, “eager to prove that the faith the country had shown in their Italianitá (Italianess) was fully warranted.” Their courage stands in sharp contrast to “the cowardice shown” by the world’s initial reluctance “to take action against the rise of Fascism.” Italian Jewry offers a lesson in ambition and resilience, patriotism and bravery.
A fluent, personal account of the role of Italian Jews in the making of modern Europe.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781589882058
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
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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