Cheshin and Melamed, onetime aides to former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and Hutman, formerly of the Jerusalem Post, offer a scathing exposÇ of persistent Israeli discriminatory practices against Jerusalem Arabs. Beginning in 1967, immediately after the Six Day War, Israel attempted to present to itself and to the world a portrait of a “united Jerusalem.” Israel’s eloquent spokesman, Abba Eban, then described Jerusalem to the United Nations as a city of “harmonious civic union.” Yet, at the same time, thousands of Israelis began to build housing on land expropriated from the East Jerusalem Arabs, with little regard for their concerns. While Mayor Kollek paid lip service to Arab demands for improved services, his priorities, state the authors, “were the same as those of other Israeli leaders to increase the Jewish presence in all parts of the city as fast as possible, while doing for the Arab residents only what was necessary to keep them placated.” The housing situation became so difficult for Jerusalem Arabs that many of them left for the “suburbs” in the West Bank, only to find themselves cut off from their families in Jerusalem. When the Intifada began to impact the city, the Israelis tried to downplay its violence, attributing the clashes and injuries to a few unruly teenagers. Kollek continued to believe that he could “buy peace and quiet in east Jerusalem by improving services and carrying out public work projects to make the Arabs feel they are being treated fairly.” But the Intifada was a nationalist explosion that the authors tie to years of Israeli inequality regarding basic health, education, and welfare services of its Arab inhabitants. While the book can seem a little shrill at times, the point is well made that Israel could do more for at least those East Jerusalem Arabs who who don—t openly oppose the state, and there is much here that informs the debate on Israel’s ground zero. (4 maps)
Pub Date: May 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-80136-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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