Those looking for a moving and humane account of the lives of Palestinians will be rewarded, but readers expecting an...
An intense look at the difficult daily existence of people who are often little more than pawns in a bigger chess game.
A half-Palestinian Christian who grew up in Beirut, Makdisi (English and Comparative Literature/UCLA; William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 2002, etc.) combines interviews with average citizens and a detailed history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even those not supportive of the Palestinian cause may be affected by the author’s stark descriptions of the restrictions on liberty that he asserts are a hallmark of the Israeli occupation. A Palestinian man describes how guards punished him when he and his family tried to get into a shorter line while going through a border crossing on the West Bank: “I did not lose consciousness, but the many blows I suffered completely disoriented me. The two soldiers…punched and kicked me all over my body.” Occasionally the quotations run too long and begin to ramble, decreasing their effectiveness, and the narrative sometimes awkwardly straddles the line between academic and general-interest text. The author rarely discusses underlying reasons for Israeli actions, such as the ongoing threat of suicide bombers and the stated desire of some Palestinian leaders to destroy Israel. In his extensive discussion of Israel’s creation and the concomitant displacement of many Palestinians, he impugns the motives of Zionists and their allies throughout Western Europe and rarely displays the empathy for the Israelis that he asks people to show for the Palestinians. Makdisi dismisses the efforts of some Israeli and Western leaders to resolve the conflict and create a Palestinian homeland (e.g., the 2000 Camp David compromise rejected by PLO leader Yasser Arafat) as both insincere and insufficient.
Those looking for a moving and humane account of the lives of Palestinians will be rewarded, but readers expecting an evenhanded assessment will be disappointed.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06606-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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