A provocative, ultimately hopeful view of a tormented place.
A carefully woven history of the city once called “the Bride of Palestine.”
The Israeli-Arab conflict is often chronicled as a clash of monoliths with no personal dimension, though recent works such as Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree (2006) and Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire (2006) mark a humanizing trend. This book joins them: Drawing on the memories of Jewish, Muslim and Christian families with roots in the ancient Arab city, journalist Le Bor does much to give a sense of the “intricacy of a century-old struggle.” That struggle begins with the arrival of Zionist immigrants who saw the old port city of Jaffa as a typically chaotic, dirty Mediterranean place; rejecting it, they built modern communities all around, and in time Jaffa became but a decaying suburb of the new metropolis of Tel Aviv. The city saw much strife in 1921, when anti-immigrant riots spread across Palestine, resulting in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, an event that would be long remembered by both sides. The city was nearly emptied during the war of 1948; the Jewish mayor of Jaffa pleaded with Arab residents to remain, but tens of thousands fled, and in time many residents of Jaffa came to live “as though the Palestinians had never existed.” Many others did not, though, and Le Bor highlights the peacemakers among the city’s ethnic factions, such as an Arab baker whose shop became a nondenominational sanctuary from the troubles outside. As Le Bor observes, Jaffa, still without many of its Arab/Palestinian residents, has lately become gentrified and cleaned up, if sanitized and perhaps soulless in the bargain; against this trend, he writes, community activists are trying “not just to rebuild things but to try to connect them together again. Because Jaffa has to be the place where Jews, Muslims and Christians can connect, like they used to.”
A provocative, ultimately hopeful view of a tormented place.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-32984-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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