An inspiring account of the relationship between the struggle to defend pragmatic liberalism and the dilemmas and conflicts...
Dubnov (History/Stanford Univ.) debuts with a biography of Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the world-renowned Jewish historian and philosopher.
The author provides insight into both Berlin and the English culture and society to which his family fled to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and revolution. Dubnov claims that the mature Berlin's ideas of freedom and “value pluralism” were rooted in his experiences defining and maintaining a Jewish identity during the 1920s and ’30s, while also assimilating into Oxford academic culture. Berlin's participation in the philosophical disputes of the day took place against the background of the British elite's appeasement of Hitler and Nazism and the Peel Commission's adoption of partition for Palestine. Such conflicts were foreshadowed in encounters with the anti-Semitic Christian “Englishness” of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and later with the views of retired imperial officials at All Souls College, Oxford. They were echoed during the time of Berlin's service in the United States during World War II, when it became increasingly obvious that Churchill's government was not going to support the establishment of Israel, and America's Zionists began to follow their own path. This was also the time when Berlin first made the acquaintance of Chaim Weizmann and became a Zionist, and the author compares what he calls Berlin's postwar “diaspora Zionism” with his becoming a political thinker of freedom.
An inspiring account of the relationship between the struggle to defend pragmatic liberalism and the dilemmas and conflicts of politics.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-11070-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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