Absorbing and convincing: an exemplary work of journalistic history.
A lucid history of a year that began in agony and self-doubt and ended with a nation made powerful and purposeful.
In the mid-1960s, writes Ha’aretz columnist Segev (One Palestine, Complete, 2000, etc.), most Israelis were convinced that the Arab nations surrounding them would one day resume their goal of destroying Israel, and, moreover, “that Israelis could offer nothing to induce them to recognize the state and make peace.” At home, Israelis found a fresh enemy in new militant and terrorist Palestinian organizations—but also in inflation and an economy guaranteed to frustrate anyone seeking to grow rich, or even make a living. Televisions and autos were new to many; so was Coca-Cola, that seal of modernity’s approval. Israelis, writes Segev, were cautious but enthusiastic travelers, always glad to huddle with other Israelis abroad; yet at home there were considerable divisions and inequalities, political and economic, between Ashkenazi and Sephardim. In short, the nation was undergoing a crisis of confidence fueled by very real threats, but also existential ones. The broad-front attack by Egypt and Syria (and soon Jordan) changed much of that, unifying the nation—and revealing some of the hidden quirks that shape history but are seldom described, such as Ezer Weizman’s response to that Jordanian attack. “Israel could have responded by defeating the Jordanian army without taking the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Segev charges, but did so because Weizman felt it necessary to humiliate King Hussein. Elsewhere, Segev chronicles war crimes on the part of the Israeli army, documents failed intelligence that cost many lives and recounts unseemly demands on the part of LBJ, all of which add to the overall newsworthiness of this fine book. What is clear is that Israeli resolve grew—and became more rigid—as a direct result of the 1967 war, which, Segev notes in closing, had a “troublesome permanency; everything that would now happen occurred in its shadow.”
Absorbing and convincing: an exemplary work of journalistic history.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7057-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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