Lovers of Jerusalem will feel right at home as Hoffman brings a small bit of its history to life.
Hoffman (My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, 2009, etc.) studies three very different architects responsible for the look of Jerusalem.
The author’s bond to Jerusalem is responsible for her quest in and around the Jaffa Road to find the versions and visions of the city initiated by these diverse men. She explains how they were drawn to build in this city and explores their difficulties, artistic foibles, and personal oddities that perhaps are what made them great. First is Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), an established international celebrity. He and his wife left Nazi Germany in the 1930s for Britain and eventually Palestine. There, he embraced the “oriental” Arab feel, designing buildings comfortable in their environment, with thick walls and small windows. In Jerusalem, he envisioned filling the entire ridge of Mount Scopus with a hospital, medical center, and university. The second figure in Hoffman’s narrative is Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1891-1976), who left England as a young man, never to return. He, too, was captivated by the feel of the East, borrowing elements from the Islamic and Byzantine traditions, from alternating light and dark stripes to geometrically ornamented door panels. The last and most curious man in the book is the mysterious, elusive, and obscure Spyro Houris. His buildings are distinguished by stylized characteristics: ornate railings, crenellated parapets, and the magnificent ceramics of David Ohannessian. The author’s frustrating search led her through archives, histories of Houris’ clients, and even a possible partner, but she discovered very little about the man himself. Hoffman effectively brings out Jerusalem’s diversity in the personages of the Jewish Mendelsohn, the Christian Harrison, and the Arab Houris. They worked in a period of political upheaval trying to build for committees that couldn’t make up their minds and wouldn’t provide sufficient funds. They are responsible for buildings atop layers of ancient civilizations, perhaps providing yet another tier in Jerusalem’s archaeological history.
Lovers of Jerusalem will feel right at home as Hoffman brings a small bit of its history to life.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28910-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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