A concise but deeply tendentious summary of the issues in the region.
The deputy speaker of the Knesset, believing the Obama administration is softening American support of Israel, argues that his country should “take firm hold of its own destiny, with a ready willingness to act decisively on its own behalf.”
In this debut, Danon establishes his thesis early: Israel must think of itself first. He chides the United States for, well, thinking of itself first. The author begins his argument with a look at the current situation in the Middle East, emphasizing terrorist acts throughout the region and around the world. He worries deeply about a nuclear Iran, and he’s skeptical about the so-called “Arab Spring” and warns that revolutions can frequently produce unexpected and calamitous consequences. He takes readers through a number of Middle Eastern trouble spots (Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and others), emphasizing their tinderbox character. He follows with what he considers President Obama’s early missteps in the region—accepting the Nobel Peace Prize before he’d really accomplished anything, his Arab-friendly 2009 Cairo speech, his evident sympathy for the Palestinian desire for a separate state and his misunderstanding of the situation in Jerusalem. Danon also goes after Secretary of State Clinton for her criticism of some women’s issues in Israel, Leon Panetta, and the U.S. media and institutions of higher education. Danon then offers some brief history lessons: the establishment of the state of Israel, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israeli strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. He ends with a defense of Israel’s right to exist, citing biblical texts and international law, and he claims that there should be no Palestinian state (they’ve already got Jordan, he writes), and that a peaceful, thriving Israel will benefit the world as a whole.
A concise but deeply tendentious summary of the issues in the region.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-34176-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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