A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.
Against selective readings of history—and the horrors they enable.
Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the “extensive moral breakdown” that preceded what he describes as “the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza.” As for the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023, he says Israel’s leaders did not “shrink from exploiting” the cold-blooded attack. Formative travel and extensive research upended Mishra’s formerly “languid view of Zionism as vindication and shield of the eternally persecuted.” A frequent contributor to respected political magazines by the early 2000s, he tried to publish his reporting about “the brutality and squalor of Israel’s occupation,” which he witnessed in the West Bank in 2008. But, he says, he encountered “pre-censorship in even liberal periodicals.” This, Mishra believes, was informed by the publications’ fear of being labeled antisemitic—the result of a decades-long effort by various political actors to establish the Holocaust as “the sacred core of Israeli nationalism.” Soon after World War II, he finds, scholars worried that the Holocaust was being forgotten. But with the 1961 prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, it was front-page news once more. This was followed, in 1967 and 1973, by wars that Israel won despite appearing “existentially threatened by its Arab enemies.” Thereafter, American politicians, stung by defeat in Vietnam, saw “an apparently invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East.” Meanwhile, the sentimentalization of the Holocaust in popular novels and Hollywood films dovetailed with the Israeli nationalist position that “those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.” At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls “a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity” and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by “historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism” wonder why “their own holocausts…have not been much regarded in history.”
A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798217058891
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
