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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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