An innovative, rewarding contribution to Jewish history.
Multivocal history, focusing on the author’s family, of the European Jewish diaspora.
Part of Cockerell’s family arrived in London from Ukraine when World War I broke out, and for her great-grandfather, in some ways, “his pre-war existence belonged to a lost world.” That existence included work in the highest reaches of Theodor Herzl’s original Zionist movement, which sought a homeland in an unfriendly world. With Herzl and, importantly, the largely forgotten intellectual and writer Israel Zangwill, David Jochelmann sought that homeland across the globe, including by means of the so-called Galveston Plan, where 10,000 Jews arrived in the U.S. by way of the Texas port, “sent there from Russia by my great-grandfather.” With a narrative whose voices are drawn from a vast range of published sources—books, letters, newspaper and journal articles—Cockerell gives shape to Jochelmann, perhaps the least known of the Zionist leaders. Along the way she looks at the slow elaboration of what would become the Jewish nation: at one point Palestine, which the New York Sun called “smaller than the State of New Jersey,” and later, in a misbegotten episode, British East Africa, “one of the few sections of Africa where white men may thrive,” which led to a rebellion against Herzl by many followers, intent on settling in Palestine instead. For many, the destination proved to be New York City, with the Tribune opining, “Few outside the Jewish world appreciate the vast difficulties involved in the Americanization of the Russian Hebrew,” while the financier Jacob Schiff urged that “the Jew of the future is, to my mind, the Russian Jew transformed by American methods.” Jochelmann himself (losing the second “n” after arriving) went to London, helping organize anti-Nazi resistance but dying before the horrors of the Holocaust became known, and before the independent Jewish state he envisioned took shape.
An innovative, rewarding contribution to Jewish history.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780374609269
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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