A unique 1,000-year-old book is the pursued object of this scriptural detective story.
Inscribed with precision on vellum in the 10th century, the book known as the Crown of Aleppo has been, over the centuries, the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. Produced by a sect that owed fealty solely to the written Word, the Crown survived the Crusades in Jerusalem. In the outskirts of Cairo in the 12th century, it was studied by the great physician-philosopher Maimonides. It traveled eventually to Aleppo, Syria, where it was reverently safeguarded in a synagogue. That history is not disputed. But in 1947, when the establishment of the State of Israel was ratified by the UN, an anti-Semitic riot erupted and the Aleppo synagogue was torched and sacked. The sacred text was saved, hidden with a Muslim merchant, transported covertly to Turkey and eventually brought back to Jerusalem and the new Jewish nation. Nevertheless, it was not a happy ending. Only three-fifths of the Crown ended in the hands of the government caretakers. Absent was the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses. The dramatic story of the book and the search for the missing pages attracted a president of Israel, undercover agents, specialists and colorful and wealthy dealers in ancient texts. There were false trails, lies and deaths. The best theory: The central jewels of the Aleppo Crown were taken after it reached Jerusalem. After more than half a century, the pages have still not been recovered, but AP correspondent Friedman is fairly sure who took them, naming a learned, highly placed government official, a sage collector could not resist the remarkable text. As the author wryly concludes, the “page with the passage Thou shalt not steal was stolen. Also missing are the commandments not to bear false witness, covet another’s property, or commit murder”—all violated, he notes in his sharply etched story of the Aleppo Codex. Through the Levantine haze and a millennium of safekeeping, a carefully paced narrative of purloined Judaica.
Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61620-040-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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