Sixteen thoughtful, sometimes penetrating essays and long reviews, most of which originally appeared during the past decade in the New York Review of Books, about the outstanding political personalities and societal issues of contemporary Israeli life. Margalit (Philosophy/Hebrew Univ.; The Decent Society, 1996, etc.), a political columnist, notes “the tendency to describe and think about Israel in allegories” and the fact that “much of the criticism of Israel, both internal and external, is directed at its pretensions rather than its reality.” By contrast, he focuses on the specific character and historical records of such political leaders as Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, the late Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres, as well as on the psychological, ideological, and socio-economic repercussions of such phenomena as the large-scale immigration to Israel from the former USSR. His best essays, “The Rise of the Ultra-Orthodox,” “The Use of the Holocaust in Israel,” and “The Kitsch of Israel,” deal with the mythos of the Jewish state. Usually, Margalit writes as an observer, though hardly a dispassionate one; his “dovish” sentiments are evident. His fluid prose also manifests a keen awareness of the many paradoxical and ironical aspects of Israeli life, as when the author observes that right-wing immigrants —vacillate between a sense of megalomania about Israeli might, on the one hand, and on the other, feelings of extreme self-pity and powerlessness.” His writing reveals that with the country’s many internal tensions and countervailing trends, not to mention its balkanized party system, nothing is self-evident or simple about current Israeli politics. Readers who want a souvenir album about Israel at 50 should pass on this one. But others will enjoy the resounding uneasiness of Margalit’s pieces.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-24941-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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