Readers who grant the author his Israeli bias will find this a reasoned and perspicacious overview of the Western failure to...
Israeli journalist Bergman documents convincingly and with a fair amount of balance Iran’s backing of Hizballah and other terrorist fronts to undermine Israeli and U.S. policies.
Armed with incriminating documents retrieved by Iranian students from the American embassy in Tehran in 1979—classified information that revealed intensive intelligence collaboration among the shah, the United States and Israel—the Khomeini-led revolutionary regime in Iran vowed “death to Israel” and largely blamed the Jews for the country’s turmoil. Bergman chronicles these growing hostilities from the fraught earliest days of the revolution, when Abraham Geffen, an Iranian Jew working for El Al, collaborated with the Mossad to help stranded Jews get out of Iran. The narrative continues through the Iran-Iraq war, successive Lebanese wars and the mid-1980s establishment of Hizballah in southern Lebanon. From the outset, asserts Bergman, Hizballah’s goals were to replace the existing Lebanese regime with Shi’ite Muslim leadership, to liberate Jerusalem, eradicate the Jewish state and drive Western forces out of the region. Under the noses of Israeli and American intelligence officials, Hizballah intensified terrorist efforts, perfecting the arts of suicide bombing, assassinations and hostage taking. Efforts to stop Hizbollah (and further other hawkish aims of the Reagan administration) led to the nexus of covert U.S. and Israeli dealings that sparked the Iran-Contra scandal. In the decades-long struggle between Iran/Hizbollah and Israel/America, even the fate of a single individual—Israeli Defense Force airman Ron Arad, shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and never heard from again—could prompt kidnappings, assassinations and terrorist bombings around the globe. Bergman looks carefully at the Iranians’ worldwide terrorist connections, drug rings and counterfeit operations, support for al-Qaeda and growing rapprochement with Hamas. His wake-up call ends by asserting that the threat of nuclear war is very real, thanks in part to an Israeli arms trader’s lucrative sales of weapons of mass destruction to Iran.
Readers who grant the author his Israeli bias will find this a reasoned and perspicacious overview of the Western failure to recognize the Iranian threat.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5839-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
