Cohen fans will savor this little-known footnote in the singer’s life.
A famous singer brings joy and hope to beleaguered Israeli troops.
In October 1973, Syrian and Egyptian forces attacked Israel, starting the Yom Kippur War, and the “strange appearance” of a Leonard Cohen tour at the time has “lived on as underground history.” In this compelling book, award-winning journalist Friedman, a winner of the Sami Rohr Prize, among others, recounts in detail the desert war from the Israeli perspective and Cohen’s role in it. The singer was 39 when he traveled to Sinai, in the grip of drugs, anger, and frustration and disgusted by the music business. Friedman includes a previously unpublished manuscript, “livid and obscene,” that Cohen wrote after his trip to his “myth home,” as Cohen called it. “Cohen’s manuscript about the war tends to raise more questions than it answers,” writes the author. “He’s unwilling to explain directly what he was thinking.” Amid the fighting, it’s unclear exactly where and when the improvised concerts took place, but his first performance took place at Hatzor air base, where he wrote and performed “Lover Lover Lover.” At the time, Cohen wrote “Perhaps I can protect some people with this song.” Friedman includes many emotional reminiscences from soldiers who fought and attended the concerts, describing how much they appreciated the presence of Cohen, who asked them to use his Hebrew name: “ ‘Leonard’ was a foreigner. ‘Eliezer’ was a sibling.” Cohen sang “Suzanne” often—a version of it was then circulating in Hebrew—and he slept on the floor and ate combat rations like everyone else. One soldier said he “gave off an aura of good-heartedness, of unusual humanity.” Cohen told a reporter that he “came to raise their spirits, and they raised mine.” The brief tour wound down with stops at Gen. Ariel Sharon’s desert headquarters, the Sharm el-Sheikh airfield, and a spot outside Suez City. An engaging historical resurrection, the book also includes rare photos.
Cohen fans will savor this little-known footnote in the singer’s life.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954118-07-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
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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