Flamboyant Harvard Law professor and appellate advocate Dershowitz (The Best Defense, Reversal of Fortune, etc.) writes engagingly and bluntly of the unique problems and challenges of being Jewish in general, and being Jewish in America in particular. With all the persuasiveness and ``chutzpah'' for which he has become renowned in his criminal-defense work, Dershowitz assails the view (which he contends is current among both Jews and gentiles of his generation) that American Jews are merely ``guests'' in a predominantly Christian America, and that American Jews must defer to views and sensibilities of non-Jewish citizens. He also rejects the notion that American Jews are ``second-class Jews'' simply because they live in the heterodox US and have not made aliyah (i.e., migrated to Israel). American Jews, he says, ``need not compromise either...Americanism or...Jewishness.'' Using as starting points personal anecdotes of his own childhood in the Orthodox community of Brooklyn, his education at Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, his brief period of law-firm practice, his Supreme Court clerkship, his academic career, and his involvement with such cases as the Jonathan Pollard spy case and a libel case against the anti- Semitic Polish Cardinal Glemp, Dershowitz explores issues of anti-Semitism, discrimination against Jews, and loyalty to Israel. Proudly, he urges American Jews to assert their own self- interest without guilt or fear. Occasionally, he exhibits an unfortunate tendency to vilify those who disagree with him (Noam Chomsky, Norman Podhoretz, Patrick Buchanan), but his narrative is absorbing, his discussions lively, and his arguments often convincing. An energetic and stimulating exposition of the primary political and cultural issues confronting Jewish Americans.
Pub Date: May 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-18137-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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 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
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