Based on interviews with dozens of people and research in more than 20 archival collections, Siniver’s sympathetic,...
The biography of a defender of Israel who advocated diplomacy over war.
Abba Eban (1915-2002) held significant positions in the Israeli government—representative to the United Nations, ambassador to the United States, Education and Culture minister, deputy prime minister, and minister of foreign affairs—but never served as prime minister, a position he coveted. In this engrossing, impressively researched biography, Siniver (Political Science and International Studies/Univ. of Birmingham; The Yom Kippur War: Politics, Diplomacy, Legacy, 2013, etc.) traces the career of a statesman acclaimed more outside of his country than within. Eban’s urbanity, fastidiousness, and flowery speaking style contributed to a perception that he was “aloof and condescending.” Although he spoke 10 languages, Yiddish was not one of them, and his “ingrained internationalism, suave demeanor,” and elite education set him apart from “rough and tumble Israeli politics.” In many ways, Siniver asserts, Eban was like his friend Adlai Stevenson, a victim of anti-intellectualism. As he chronicles Eban’s career, the author reveals fierce internal conflicts and rivalries: Eban made an enemy of Golda Meir early in his career; Yitzhak Rabin was Eban’s “biggest nemesis” for two decades; Moshe Dayan was “the most formidable of Eban’s political adversaries” in the 1960s. Eban consistently opposed military solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflicts. “Usually the dove is nicer than the hawk,” he said. “I haven’t found any reference in the Bible to a useful mission performed by a hawk.” Although often derided in Israel, Eban rose to prominence in the U.S., where he taught at Columbia, Princeton, and George Washington University and where he was a highly paid lecturer. In old age, when his cousin Oliver Sacks asked how he wanted to be remembered, Eban replied, “as a teacher.”
Based on interviews with dozens of people and research in more than 20 archival collections, Siniver’s sympathetic, cleareyed biography deserves to be called definitive.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0933-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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