A terrific chronicle of a unique world leader.
An evenhanded new biography of one the larger-than-life Israeli leader.
During her entire 50-year public career, Golda Meir (1898-1978) was dedicated to the cause of Zionism and creation of the state of Israel, from joining the socialist Workers of Zion movement in high school in Milwaukee in 1915, to becoming the fourth prime minister of Israel in 1969. In this suitably admiring but hardly gushing chronicle, versatile writer and journalist Klagsbrun (The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day, 2012, etc.) guides readers through her own journey of understanding this enormously important, often contradictory, crafty, and frequently opaque personage in Israel's history. The project is the result of a long-running research between America and Israel, including the use of newly declassified files. Meir—whom Klagsbrun refers to as “Golda” throughout because that is the way the premier wanted to be addressed, only adopting the Hebraized version of her married name, Meyerson, because her mentor David Ben-Gurion strongly suggested it in the late 1950s—was hugely popular, even adored, as an effective rainmaker for Israel in 1940s and ’50s America, the land of her youth; yet later in Israel, it was a different story. Meir never regained the popularity she enjoyed when first becoming premier in Israel in 1969. In a time of a series of debilitating terrorist attacks and an alarming (for her) unraveling of the social fabric, including, ironically, the thrust of feminism, she and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were blamed for being blindsided by the attacks of Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and she resigned over the painful subsequent protests. As the author shows in her well-rounded portrait, Meir was Ben-Gurion’s “only man in the Israeli cabinet," a ferocious chain-smoking socialist leader without a high-level education but whose plainspoken speeches brought audiences to tears—and action.
A terrific chronicle of a unique world leader.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4237-9
Page Count: 856
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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