A useful reading of history and politics in the light of mythmaking and media.
From Genesis to Revelation: a well-argued study of the place of Israel in American culture.
In the zombie apocalypse, as Brad Pitt so vividly learned in the film version of World War Z, always have an Israeli soldier at your side, and preferably “a buff Israeli woman soldier who is a symbol of Israeli feminism and modernity.” Even if feminism and modernity are in retreat in the United States, it was a good match: They staved off the end of civilization and saved our unworthy souls. Since the founding of the modern state of Israel 70 years ago, writes Kaplan (English/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, 2003, etc.), Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have seen in that nation a reflection and confirmation of their own, a system of affinities drawing on “powerful myths about their kinship and heritage, their suffering and salvation.” The author examines how those exceptionalist myths were made, often through the medium of popular literature and film. World War Z is but one case. Six decades earlier, the legendary journalist I.F. Stone traveled to Mandate Palestine onboard a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Europe and wrote a now largely forgotten book, Underground to Palestine, which “included the major tropes of the narrative that progressive Americans told about Zionism in the years following World War II.” Those tropes also play out in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus, which, in Kaplan’s view, recapitulates some of the opening-of-the-frontier stories Americans tell about themselves. The tropes change to fit the narrative at hand: Some of the author’s cases argue that it’s the battle for land that keeps Israelis and Arabs apart, some the battle of good and evil. Much of the book is confirmation rather than eye-opener, but Kaplan’s tour of literature and film shows how common understandings of Israel and the U.S. have been shaped—and distorted, as with the Trump administration’s relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem.
A useful reading of history and politics in the light of mythmaking and media.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-73762-4
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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