If you’re looking for nuance, you won’t find it here.
A furious attack on the Israeli state.
“Israel was founded largely on lies,” proclaims Hedges, including, by his lights, “the lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize seventy-eight percent of historic Palestine.” The author and former New York Times journalist adds, “The Israeli public is infected with racism,” so much so that it tolerates “Israeli’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza,” a term fraught with echoes of Nazi “living space” expansionism, very much intended. And the vicious Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians, among them attendees at a rock concert? Well, it “included atrocities,” Hedges allows, and Hamas, with a master plan of its own, may have enshrined the destruction of Israel in its foundational document, but even so, “Hamas is not, despite what Israel and Washington say, a terrorist organization.” However, Israel is, in Hedges’ view, alternately a member of a “cabal” of arms dealers “dedicated to permanent war” and a puppet master controlling the U.S. Congress, media, and academia through a combination of bribes and bullying. There is no doubt that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has been brutal, leading to a catastrophic loss of life. Many of Hedges’ hyperbolic accusations, though, long predate the war in Gaza, old tropes freshened by new broadside-of-the-barn charges: Columbia is “a Potemkin university,” both Americans and Israelis are “infected with the same white supremacy,” the Palestinian Authority is “a hated colonial police force,” and so forth.
If you’re looking for nuance, you won’t find it here.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644214855
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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