Even if Glick’s were indisputably the right course of action, the constant aggressiveness is off-putting. The choir won’t...
Can peace ever come to the Middle East? Not with the implacable parties involved, one wing of which informs this unyielding polemic.
Jerusalem Post senior contributing editor Glick, who is based in Jerusalem, announces early on that the Palestinian demand that Jewish settlers leave Israeli-occupied territories is inherently “anti-Semitic.” Why? Apparently because any opposition to any act by any Israeli constitutes anti-Semitism. Moreover, the two-state solution that the United States has long explored and more recently endorsed, a solution now being brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry, “requires Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally, to transform itself from a powerful nation, capable of defending itself from infiltration and invasion, into a strategic basket case that survives at the pleasure of its enemies.” Glick’s arguments about the illegitimacy of the Palestinian government and the desire of all right-thinking Palestinians to live in Israeli-style (if not Israeli) democracy have a sometimes-familiar ring, reminiscent of the belief of U.S. hawks in Vietnam that inside every Vietnamese was an American screaming to get out. Whatever the case, it doesn’t take the author long to play the Hitler card (“The main factor that motivated the Arabs to support the Nazis was not British actions in the Mandate. It was Jew hatred”), nor to insist that the American government has been mesmerized by the Palestinian cobra into “fundamental misunderstandings of the Palestinian reality,” leading to the apparently misbegotten view that the Palestinians might just deserve national self-determination. But give them the vote, she warns, and they’ll do just what Arabs do: choose Islamist candidates and their “totalitarian ideology.”
Even if Glick’s were indisputably the right course of action, the constant aggressiveness is off-putting. The choir won’t mind the preaching, but the arguments here aren’t likely to sway many other readers.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-34806-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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