For Gordis, Begin stands as an exemplary leader whose selflessness and deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel...
A life of Menachem Begin (1913–1992) considers his legacy.
With multiple biographies of Begin published in the last 10 years, Gordis (Senior Vice President/Shalem Coll.; The Promise of Israel, 2012, etc.) re-examines the controversial Israeli leader in order “to look at his life through the lens of the passion he still evokes” and to ask, “What was the ‘magic’ of his draw?” Born in Poland, Begin joined the Zionist Betar movement, founded by the charismatic Vladimir Jabotinsky. Serving in a leadership position in that organization, Begin honed his skills as a public speaker and committed himself to two basic ideas: the Jews must have their own state; independence required military strength. In 1939, Begin and his wife fled Poland for Palestine but got only as far as Vilna, Lithuania. There, Begin was arrested by the Soviets; although sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp, he was released after six months, joined the Free Polish Army and was sent as a soldier to Palestine. For the next 50 years, Begin was an outspoken, galvanizing and divisive force in Israeli politics. Gordis delineates the fierce controversies within the Zionist communities and focuses especially on the rivalry between Begin and David Ben-Gurion, a battle between Begin’s “romantic preoccupation” with Jewish victimization and Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic belief that Israel needed to move beyond the past. That essential difference resulted in opposing military, political and social strategies. In 1977, after losing eight consecutive elections, Begin finally achieved high office and became, as Gordis puts it, “the most Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers.” His first act was to give asylum to 66 Vietnamese refugees, and he insisted on welcoming Ethiopian Jews. Signing a hard-won peace treaty earned both Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat a Nobel Peace Prize.
For Gordis, Begin stands as an exemplary leader whose selflessness and deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel should inspire any who may question “the legitimacy of love for a specific people or devotion to its ancestral homeland.”Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4312-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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 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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