Sure to provoke a good deal of hissing as well as applause.
The highly visible attorney seeks “to influence, in a positive direction, [the] discernible shift away from bipartisan support for the Middle East’s only democracy and America’s most reliable ally.”
Never one to shy away from attention, Dershowitz (The Case Against Impeaching Trump, 2018, etc.) has always liked a good argument, and he has found plenty of fodder in Israeli policies over the decades. Mostly, he has taken on the role of “defending Israel in the court of public opinion,” mainly in terms of defending Israel’s security and right to exist. The author writes clearly about how important the founding of the state was to him and his Zionist family: “There was never a time that Israel was not part of my consciousness.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dershowitz was a part of many hot-button cases, including those involving anti-war protesters and capital punishment. (Later, of course, he was part of the “dream team” assembled to defend O.J. Simpson in his murder trial.) In fighting for Israel on the public stage, the author has often condemned the legitimization, by some elements of the political left, of Palestinian aggression—yet he also defends “the right of those who demonized Israel…to express their hateful views.” This distinction of basic civil rights has become personal in recent years, as students on college campuses have attempted to ban Dershowitz from speaking engagements. While the author maintains that “criticizing Israel’s settlement and occupation policies is fair game,” he is appalled by the disproportionality of world condemnation, as was expressed in the 2008 Goldstone Report by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which Dershowitz skewered. Recently, he writes, “the degree of condemnation and demonization is all out of proportion to what is warranted,” especially regarding what he sees as a “new anti-Semitism” sweeping American campuses. Unbowed and proud, Dershowitz leaves readers with a singing endorsement of “the most successful new nation that has been born—really reborn—during the past century.”
Sure to provoke a good deal of hissing as well as applause.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17996-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
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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