A perceptive history of a beleaguered nation and one deeply flawed leader.
An unsparing examination of the Israeli prime minister’s rise to power.
Journalist Pfeffer, Israeli correspondent for the Economist and senior correspondent for Haaretz, makes his literary debut with a biting portrait of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu (b. 1949), an ambitious politician whose racist, right-wing views have shaped “a deeply fractured Israeli society, living behind walls.” The son of historian Benzion Netanyahu and brother of fallen soldier Jonathan, Bibi embraced the “family mythology” that “constantly tried to place itself at the center of the Zionist narrative.” The author stresses the importance of Bibi’s American experience, which began in high school, when his father took an academic position in Pennsylvania. Although disdaining “the liberal-leaning, Democrat-voting American Jews” he met, he appreciated American capitalism and the style of American political campaigns. In 1981, as deputy chief of mission at Israel’s Washington embassy, Netanyahu set out to become a media personality. “Ever a perfectionist,” Pfeffer writes, “he worked assiduously on his televisual skills, taking lessons from professional coaches” and rehearsing his delivery “of terse and soundbite-heavy sentences.” Three years later, he was appointed ambassador to the U.N., where he “became a star of the air waves.” In 1996, with no political experience, he won a slim victory over Shimon Peres by inflaming Israel’s fear of its Arab neighbors. Besides coveting power, Netanyahu acquired a taste for luxury, extravagances that led to financial scandals later in his career. As he examines his subject’s fraught relationships with Israeli politicians and U.S. presidents, Pfeffer portrays Bibi as an arrogant, polarizing figure, incapable of compromise and, like Donald Trump, “lacking in introspection.” Netanyahu has never wavered in his bleak view of history, in which the Jewish homeland was threatened by “the genocidal urge of the Arab nations to destroy the Jewish presence.” He opposed any move to relinquish control of the West Bank and Golan Heights, conceding only “limited autonomy” to Palestinians living in those areas.
A perceptive history of a beleaguered nation and one deeply flawed leader.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09782-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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