A dogged reporter reveals essential truths, from his home and his heart, never broadcast on the evening news—a welcome bit...
An award-winning war correspondent files penetrating stories of Israel containing scant politics and much personal observation.
Fletcher (Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World, 2008, etc.), the longtime NBC News bureau chief in Tel Aviv, walked the length of Israel from the Lebanese border to Gaza. His trek took him from Galilee to Achziv and a surviving kibbutz, Acre to Haifa and Herzliya, Tel Aviv-Jaffa to Ashkelon, and finally a sighting of Gaza City. Though exceedingly difficult both physically and mentally, the trip provides an engaging portrait of an Israel for which the author cares deeply. No longer a dispassionate broadcaster, Fletcher candidly observes cultural and geographical diversity in a disputed and disputative place, and he encountered many likable and articulate people along the way—Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Zionists, Palestinians and Israelis. They all emerged from simple stereotypes to reveal the famously complex character of the Holy Land, along with the spectacular geography and unrivaled history. With consideration of today’s kibbutzim and the plight of veterans of the Shoah, the author provides insight into the methods of soldiering and considers the predicament of Israeli Arabs. Still, he writes, the norm is coexistence, and mosques, churches and synagogues are neighbors that are not always at odds. From the world’s tinderbox, Fletcher, a son of Holocaust survivors, is a quiet but strong and vital voice amid all the shouting. “I wondered which was closer to the true nature of life in Israel—lazing on the beach with a book or running to the bomb shelter with a baby?,” he writes. “And if it’s a bit of both, then truly, this place must drive you crazy—like a serial bungee jumper guessing when the rope will break.”
A dogged reporter reveals essential truths, from his home and his heart, never broadcast on the evening news—a welcome bit of sanity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-53481-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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