Rigorous research gathered in a succinct presentation renders this an excellent resource.
A fresh study of the deeply prescient thought of this visionary journalist, playwright and founding Zionist.
This is not an intimate look at Theodor Herzl’s life (1860-1904) but rather a knowledgeable exploration of the evolution of his thought about the establishment of a Jewish state. Avineri (Political Science/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem; Moses Hess: The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, 2005, etc.) jumps right to the quick: The Hungarian-born, German-speaking Jewish editor for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse was not the first to advocate for a Jewish nation-state; Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker had notably preceded him (though Herzl did not read either of their works until later). In the latter decades of the 19th century, when Herzl came of age, Jews had moved from the margins of Western and Central European society to the pinnacles of achievement in the professions and arts. Yet their very success “was seen as threatening,” especially in German-speaking lands, leading to the first tremors of anti-Semitism as early as 1817. As a former law student, Herzl wrote firsthand on these persistent outbreaks of anti-Semitism—e.g., the scandals surrounding the Panama Canal and the Dreyfus Affair. However, contrary to popular mythology regarding Herzl’s life, it was his reading of Eugen Dühring’s 1881 essay, “The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Issue,” which outlined the inferiority of Jews, that convinced Herzl of the failure of Jewish emancipation. Influenced by the currents of nationalism and worried about the huge Jewish population within a disintegrating Austro-Hungarian regime, Herzl wrote the enormously influential pamphlet The Jewish State (1896) and became, overnight, a politician for a Jewish homeland, galvanizing the Jewish Congress in Basel. Avineri briefly sketches how Herzl tirelessly rallied leaders from the highest echelons by flattering, bribing and cajoling—in an astonishingly short period of time.
Rigorous research gathered in a succinct presentation renders this an excellent resource.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1933346984
Page Count: 288
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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