Still, equal parts Fran Lebowitz and Leon Wieseltier: smart and satisfying.
Fugitive essays on the experience of being a Jewish woman in the post-Holocaust world, set in Theresienstadt, Houston, and points between.
Wisenberg (The Sweetheart Is In, 2001) has a good eye for offbeat detail, evoking loud German tourists smoking cigarettes at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery in Prague, who would somehow “know I was Jewish, despite my 1972 nose job,” cataloguing the many Yiddish words for “vagina,” deploring the strange irony of the ice-cream stands at the Terezín ghetto, now a tourist attraction for curious Americans. In these bite-size pieces, most published in venues such as Tikkun and Chicago Reader, Wisenberg explores two large subjects: the meaning of the Holocaust, and herself. Though she comes close to trivializing the former at points, she is an entertaining, self-aware narrator. A high point comes when Wisenberg considers the matter of Monica Lewinsky, reading whose biography, she writes, “is like taking a five-hour call from your most annoying friend when you were fourteen years old, the one with constant boy problems.” In a weird but inspired turn, Wisenberg compares Lewinsky to the Holocaust martyr Hannah Senesh, each representing the different paths that “privileged young Jewish women in the developed world can take, have open to them, make open to themselves.” (Lewinsky, of course, opened herself to such comparisons when she complained that her post–Clinton affair life “reminded me of The Diary of Anne Frank.”) Other good moments come when Wisenberg writes of being unable to cope outside the city, despite its pickpockets and street crazies; open space scares her, she confesses, and “Franz Kafka is less foreign to me than Wendell Berry.” Against such strengths, the occasional burst of workshoppy prose (“In Prague I thought, Do I fly during sex? Does she fly higher than I do? Does he?”) is jarring, and one wishes that Wisenberg had exercised a sharper pencil in editing.
Still, equal parts Fran Lebowitz and Leon Wieseltier: smart and satisfying.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-8032-4801-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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