An urgent and impassioned plea for justice in the Middle East.
A pilgrimage to Palestine brings a message of compassion and understanding.
Actor, director, and musician Butcher makes an impressive literary debut with a vibrant, moving chronicle of a five-month, 3,300-kilometer journey from London to Jerusalem to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the 50th anniversary of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the 10th anniversary of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. Sponsored by Amos Trust, a London-based human rights organization, “A Just Walk to Jerusalem” began in June 2017 with the goal of expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people and to counter Theresa May’s public endorsement of the Balfour Declaration, which, Amos Trust asserts, “precipitated a century of dispossession, conflict and suffering.” The walk attracted some 40 participants of all ages, religious backgrounds, and nationalities, all eager to make the historic pilgrimage to protest injustice and stand for equal rights. For much of the book, Butcher recounts, in lyrical, radiant prose, sights and sounds, triumphs and discomforts as the group slogged on, blistered and sweaty, across France, Switzerland, Italy, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and finally into Palestine. Here, for example, he conveys the thrill of witnessing a lightning storm from the deck of a ferry in Ancona: “Brilliant glimmers fleeting across the sky, now and then concentrated with intense radiance in soiling forks, now diffused in yellow splashes spilling behind, along and through the clouds.” On the moors in Greece, he records “a magical potpourri of sounds—tinkling goat bells and dogs woofing, bees buzzing, cicadas trilling and the silvery sliver of wrens and thrushes singing.” The author’s purpose, though, is far more consequential than to create a travel narrative: “A Just Walk” bore witness to a century of oppression. Welcomed warmly in Palestine, Butcher talked with residents whose lives had been cruelly circumscribed by Israeli settlements, who lost their homes, who were cut off from water and medicine, whose children were shot by Israeli soldiers—and who still harbored hope for peace and goodwill.
An urgent and impassioned plea for justice in the Middle East.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-211-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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