Surprising adventures on the high seas with some rogues of the Diaspora.
Swashbuckling Jewish buccaneers, roaming the Caribbean, plundering the Spanish Main? But seriously folks: Here’s the little-known history of some unintended consequences of the Spanish Inquisition.
At the dawn of the Age of Discovery, writes Jamaica-based historian Kritzler in his debut, Jews had been compelled by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity or suffer the auto-da-fé, but many of these conversos secretly maintained their ancient faith. By the 17th century, some headstrong descendants of the Jews banished by Spain in 1492 emerged as navigators, corsairs and pirates. These adventuresome Hebrews were an interesting lot. They were politicians, international adventurers and licensed privateers in geopolitical competition as much as mere robbers on the high seas. Covert Jews who never really converted, code-named “Portugals” by those with whom they dealt, sailed with Columbus and da Gama and plundered with Cortés and Pizarro. Under Barbarossa, a Portugal named Sinan commanded a fleet of 100 ships. Rabbi Palache kept a kosher cuisine aboard his privateer. Seafaring Jews operated from Holland in its Golden Age and practiced international intrigue from Jamaica, where religion was of no consequence. They settled in Curaçao and New Amsterdam (to the consternation of Peter Stuyvesant). Portugal conquistadores looted Mexico, and converso traders connived with Cromwell and the King of Spain at the same time. Cutlasses at the ready together with the occasional holy text, they traded in the sugar of Brazil and the silver of Peru, with some intentions noble and other motives base. Kritzler supplies squalls of detail, occasionally at the risk of distracting attention from the overarching narrative. He believes that the fabled gold mine of Columbus is actually on the island of Jamaica, and he and a sponsor have already staked a preemptive mining claim.
Surprising adventures on the high seas with some rogues of the Diaspora.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51398-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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 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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