A graceful, erudite guide leads us across a fractured land.
Watzman (Company C, 2005), an Israeli journalist and Orthodox Jew, ruminates on his 2004 travels by car, bicycle and foot along the great geological rift that both geographically and metaphorically splits the Holy Land.
The author does not consider the sacred texts of his people to be accurate history. Throughout, he displays a healthy skepticism—even cynicism at times—routinely challenging the assumptions of the archaeologists, ornithologists, farmers, security guards, Christian pilgrims and others he interviews. After introducing us to the geology of the rift and explaining the debate about its genesis, he begins his journey, conducted over a period of months in a variety of weather conditions. He visits scholars, some old friends and numerous significant historical sites—often of Biblical importance—and notes that, in some cases, locations (e.g., the pit into which Joseph’s jealous brothers tossed him) are highly debatable. He encounters some Christians being baptized where the Jordan leaves the Sea of Galilee; they tell him they are there because it was the site of Jesus’ baptism. Watzman does not contradict them but notes for readers that the Gospels place the event elsewhere. Some may be surprised to learn that Israel contains the world’s highest density of bird species; the author teaches us about bird behavior, always with a sharp eye on the relevance to human behavior. He is frustrated that international borders prevent his visits to some places. He ends with a stunning encounter with a Palestinian at a remote gas station.
A graceful, erudite guide leads us across a fractured land.Pub Date: June 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-13058-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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