A worthwhile review of the life of the late Israeli leader by an award-winning journalist, but it sheds little new light on one of the more intriguing personalities of the last 50 years. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, was almost the anti-politician. He was blunt, honest, and dour, didn—t tailor his remarks or his persona to his audience, and seemed always to be precisely as he presented himself. Thus, former Washington Post correspondent Kurzman (Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler’s Bomb, 1996, etc.) undertook a difficult task in attempting to explain what made Rabin tick, and he mostly disappoints in the effort. Kurzman’s central thesis is that it was Rabin’s anguish at sending so many soldiers to die as a general that led him to become a peacemaker in his two stints as prime minister, and that Rabin always had an eye to making peace possible even as, in a range of key roles, he was building Israel’s armed forces into a fearsome fighting machine. But Rabin presented this same thesis in his own memoirs, while illuminating as little as Kurzman the complexities of his character. Only in the last hundred pages, which draw on Kurzman’s access to many of the key players surrounding Rabin as he stunned Israel and the world by making peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization, does this biography finally come to multidimensional life. The chapter on the hours immediately preceding Rabin’s assassination is the best one here, and a frustrating sample of what the rest of the book might have been. We are left wanting to know more about Rabin and the pioneering, native-born Israelis with whom his life is so intimately intertwined (the publication date coincides with Israel’s 50th birthday). Rabin may have shown all his cards all the time, but one senses there are more complex explanations than those offered here for such a seemingly simple approach to life. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018684-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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