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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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