A fine new account of an unnecessary crisis that "scattered dragon's teeth on all-too-fertile soil,” which “would bear...
A tale of political bungling with tragic consequences on two continents.
Following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in July 1956, the governments of Great Britain, France, and Israel entered into a scheme for a joint invasion of Egypt. Each nation's leader had his own motivations, including control of the canal and oil pipelines, Nasser's support for Algerian rebels, Israeli access to the Red Sea, and a strong dislike of Nasser personally. Attempts to keep their collusion secret quickly led them into a tangle of lies to their allies—in particular the United States—to the United Nations, and sometimes to their own governments. The resulting invasion in October and November was a colossal diplomatic, political, and military fiasco resolved when an infuriated Dwight Eisenhower forced a British withdrawal by withholding support for the plummeting pound. This neo-colonialist folly further rendered Western governments incapable of confronting the Soviet Union when it crushed the Hungarian uprising that, by coincidence, occurred during the Suez crisis. For Eisenhower, who faced an election in early November, Suez was the mother of all October surprises. Guardian columnist von Tunzelmann's (Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean, 2011, etc.) narrative cracks along like an international political thriller as she tracks the action day by day, sometimes hour by hour. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, leads the cast of characters; unhealthily obsessed with Nasser, his quixotic effort to reassert British dominance in the Middle East effectively ended Britain's status as a great power. The author lays bare at every turn the arrogance, complacency, incompetence, and wishful thinking that drove British and French decisions in a story that could appear as comedy were it not for the death, destruction, and diplomatic wreckage that resulted.
A fine new account of an unnecessary crisis that "scattered dragon's teeth on all-too-fertile soil,” which “would bear gruesome fruit for decades.”Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-224924-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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