CBS correspondent Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman (Every Spy a Prince, 1990) explore the special but often troubled relationship between Israel and the US. America's involvemnt with Israel, despite periodic rifts, dwarfs its ties to any other nation. The authors cite estimates that Israel has received some $100 billion in various forms of aid from the US since the tiny state's 1948 birth. To that figure must be added a web of relationships between the two countries' military and intelligence communities, and the inordinate amounts of time successive administrations have devoted to the Middle East in general and Israel in particular. Raviv and Melman attribue this special relationship to a complex of factors, including American feelings of guilt for the Holocaust; the role of Israel in the prophetic visions of Christian evangelicals; the political effectiveness of the American Jewish community; and the strong personal feelings of some presidents, especially Carter and Reagan. The book is well researched but not scholarly. Rather, Raviv and Melman have spun a yarn filled with gossip and inside accounts, and even an occasional bombshell (they reveal how Israeli intelligence obtained Krushchev's seminal, top-secret anti-Stalinist speech for the CIA). Throughout, they have attempted to be scrupulously evenhanded, a difficult task in recounting events in which there were—and remain—sharp disagreements. On the negative side, especially for people with some prior knowledge, this volume's occasional superficiality will be disappointing (the complex of events, for instance, that led to Israel's involvement in the Iran- Contra affair). Also, virtually all attributions are in notes in the back of the book, making it difficult to find the sources of particular bits of information. The book's strength, on the other hand, is in its compilation of eyewitness accounts of historical moments. A good read that sheds light not just on US ties with a particular country, but on the personal and even idiosyncratic ways in which US foreign policy is sometimes made.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6006-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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