In a book with broad appeal, Ephron cogently analyzes the origins and ramifications of a national tragedy he reported on as...
“Israelis had grown tired of peace conferences. And it wasn’t at all clear whether the extremists, Arabs or Israelis, were declining or ascending.” Those words, describing the situation in the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, are just as true 20 years later.
In a single moment, the Jewish zealot Yigal Amir derailed the Oslo negotiations and forever altered the destinies of two nations. Former Newsweek Jerusalem bureau chief Ephron argues that the murder presaged the rise of the Israeli hard right, and today, with Rabin’s archrival Benjamin Netanyahu serving as prime minister and a quarter of the population supporting clemency for Amir, peace with the Palestinians seems as distant as at any time since 1948. In tense, gripping prose, the author dissects Amir’s background, describing him as a bright student who, “in his own view…knew God’s word better than most Jews, even most rabbis. And he was a doer—the characteristic that defined Amir more than any other, that distinguished him from his peers in school and in the military.” In college, he threw himself into activism but “racked up nothing but failures: the failure to draw millions to the streets; the failure to form a serious militia; and the failure to stop Rabin.” The story of Rabin’s evolving relationship with Yasser Arafat and Amir’s growing militancy unfold in parallel, Amir making repeated attempts to get close to his quarry as he schemed with his brother and harangued his college friends. Amir considered Rabin rodef, a villain who pursues Jews with the intent of killing them, and Ephron makes the solid point that “any honest interpretation of the Talmudic principle he fixated on would have pointed back at him. Amir was the real rodef.”
In a book with broad appeal, Ephron cogently analyzes the origins and ramifications of a national tragedy he reported on as a young journalist.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24209-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
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
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