A fully realized, important portrait of a significant 20th-century leader.
The “first full-scale biography” of Israel's controversial Prime Minister Menachem Begin (1913–1992).
Israel Hayom op-ed page editor Shilon compellingly integrates his subject’s life story and his contributions into the origins and growth of the state of Israel. Born in Brest-Litovsk, Begin escaped after his family was murdered by the Nazis; he was subsequently imprisoned by the Soviets. Released to fight for the Jewish units of the Anders Army, he was deployed to the Palestinian territories. There, he joined the Jewish underground, rising to leadership in the Irgun faction, which was responsible for blowing up the British headquarters at the King David Hotel. Shilon provides a fascinating account of Begin's government service between 1977 and 1983, including what became known as the “Begin doctrine,” under which Israel committed to not allowing “our enemies to develop weapons of mass destruction,” as well as the parallel peace agreement with Anwar Sadat's Egypt, for which Begin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The author’s account of the earlier conflicts over how to fight, who the enemy was, and what Israel would be shows how his subject participated in shaping the political lineups within the country for years after his tenure. Marginalized politically for many years and ridiculed by David Ben-Gurion and members of the Mapai, Begin was recalled from the fringes to government service prior to the outbreak of the 1967 war. Subsequently, he worked closely with Ariel Sharon and a group of generals, who helped him to victory and joined his coalition. Shilon demonstrates how Begin's religious conceptions greatly affected his country's political landscape.
A fully realized, important portrait of a significant 20th-century leader.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-16235-6
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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