Humanitarian activists and opponents of those settlements will find much ammunition in these pages.
A soldier’s-eye view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Breaking the Silence, an NGO founded in 2004 by Israeli Defense Forces veterans, isn’t likely to gain fans among the Likud for this collection of oral histories and testimonials from Israeli soldiers, almost all of them recounting episodes of oppression of the Palestinian minority. “In school they’re given the same worth as other human beings,” says one soldier of the Palestinians, whom he encounters daily at checkpoints and on patrols, “also at home, and also in the army according to the rules, but when you interfere in people’s lives like that, and you’re in control, and you can decide when he eats and when he does whatever, he slowly loses his worth.” The soldiers are nothing if not self-reflective, but their “harsh logic” would seem to be no different from that of any other occupying force: The other is to be feared and mistrusted, but also separated and tightly controlled, even at the risk of dehumanizing both occupied and occupier. “I hated them,” says another soldier. “I was such a racist there, as well, I was so angry at them for their filth, their misery, the whole fucking situation.” The testimonials have a depressing sameness: We thought we had to do it, many of them say, and we did it to a fault. That “it” might involve kidnapping or killing a suspected terrorist, but just as likely it involved lobbing shells to keep people from their sleep in a psychological ploy, to say nothing of entering a home and smashing a family’s belongings. All these things come through loud and clear—as does the soldiers’ disdain for illegal Israeli settlers who only multiply the bitterness and bloodshed.
Humanitarian activists and opponents of those settlements will find much ammunition in these pages.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9537-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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