Sharon’s son provides a solid template on which subsequent biographers will have to build.
The life and times of Israel's warrior leader Ariel Sharon, chronicled by his son.
The author, an Israeli columnist, debuts as a biographer with unique access to his father's documents and diaries, friends and colleagues and family memories. What emerges is a multifaceted picture of an Israeli patriot, military leader and family man. Sharon was born in 1928 in pre-independence Palestine and rose to leadership from the Haganah resistance, the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces. The author recounts three phases in his father's career, starting with the rise of the paratrooper and antiterror specialist to military leadership, with the support of Israel's first Prime Minister Ben Gurion, and concluding with the leader whose contribution to the global war against terrorism transcended national borders. In the ’50s, Sharon was opposed by those with more formal training in the command structure. Later he ran afoul of the Israeli Labour Party establishment, with consequences for the conduct of the Yom Kippur War. The author also shows that during the Lebanon war in the ’80s, U.S. and Israeli policies were not always closely aligned, and that Israeli military objectives could be subordinated to U.S. global political strategies. Out of past conflicts came what Sharon and others considered to be “red lines in the sand”—no nuclear weapons in the hands of Arabs; no superpower-like balance of power in the area; preserve Israel's capability to respond to attacks. Documents highlight Sharon's relations with current leaders like Netanyahu, Peres, Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
Sharon’s son provides a solid template on which subsequent biographers will have to build.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-172150-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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