Hardly a charm offensive, this is a straightforward account and defense of the author’s hard-line positions.
Long-winded memoir from the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history.
Two themes run throughout the monotonous narrative: Netanyahu’s admiration for his older brother, Yoni, who was killed during the special operations raid to free hostages taken by terrorists at Entebbe Airport in 1976, and the constant necessity of Israel to defend itself against aggressors. Born in Tel Aviv in 1949 to secular Jews with deep Zionist family ties, Bibi, as he was called, lived in various places in the U.S., including a stint as a student of architecture at MIT, but the excitement over the Six-Day War in 1967 brought Bibi swiftly home to start his military training. Yoni’s untimely death inspired his work in founding The Jonathan Institute, an organization against international terrorism, through which he would first meet many of the conservative intellectuals who supported his later political campaigns. From businessman to appointed “deputy chief of mission” in Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C., Bibi made his mark as a public communicator of Israel’s point of view. “I tried to speak my mind, speak my heart, and above all speak plainly,” he writes in characteristically flat fashion. After a few years as a U.N. ambassador, the author ascended the ladder in the Likud Party, and he narrowly beat Shimon Peres for the position of prime minister in 1996, when he was just 46. Beginning in 2003, when he became finance minister, his “free market revolution”—privatization, cutting welfare, and crushing unions—picked up steam. Reelected as prime minister in 2009, he doubled down against Iran’s nuclear capabilities and in destroying terrorist networks, especially Hamas. He famously came to loggerheads with Barack Obama, while with Donald Trump, he was able to see several “missions accomplished”—e.g., normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and the moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Now the leader of the opposition party again, Netanyahu seems to be scheming for a return to power.
Hardly a charm offensive, this is a straightforward account and defense of the author’s hard-line positions.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66800-844-7
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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