An impressively crafted, deeply personal history of Middle Eastern diplomacy.
Grinstein and Afilalo, experts on international law and diplomacy, combine memoir and scholarship in this survey of Israeli–Palestinian tensions.
Few issues are as harrowing on the international stage in 2024 as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attacks on the Gaza–Israeli border, the authors recall past moments of hope represented by the multi-year negotiations initiated by the Clinton administration’s Oslo Accords. As the youngest delegate at the 2000 Camp David Summit, then 30-year-old Grinstein served as secretary for the Israeli delegation and assistant chief negotiator. Blending memoir with geopolitical analysis, Grinstein offers readers a fly-on-the-wall perspective from someone with access to the tense high-level diplomatic conversations. His memories include a moment of panic when he had to give Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak the Heimlich maneuver after he choked on a snack in Camp David’s Dogwood Cabin. Grinstein also offers an insider’s analysis of the competing domestic and international pressures confronting Barak, who, at the time, “needed something to run on” in the upcoming elections. Co-author Afilalo, a professor of international law and trade at Rutgers University, provides important historical analysis and commentary that contextualizes the Oslo Accords, backed by a wealth of scholarly footnotes.
The book is divided thematically into four sections. Sections one and two center on Grinstein’s personal history and experiences as an Israeli delegate tasked with negotiating a Framework Agreement on Permanent Status with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Section three focuses on the U.S.’s role in the peace process, and on the tenuous nature of peace negotiations. The book’s final section uses the Oslo Accords as the basis for reflections on potential avenues for future peace negotiations between the two sides. This definitive history of the accords contains ample appendix material to assist readers in navigating the complexities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the myriad interest groups and individual people involved. The book also includes an essay by Grinstein in which he offers “Lessons for Aspiring History Makers”; he encourages aspirants to follow his example by becoming experts and making themselves “indispensable to the greats.” (At times the book feels a bit self-indulgent, with its inclusion of photographs of Grinstein with Bill Clinton, Barak, and other world leaders in the White House and elsewhere.) In addition to its rich, full-color photographs, the book includes an assortment of maps, images, and reproductions of primary source documents. While the authors are diplomatic in their presentations of Palestinian positions, their views are filtered through a distinctly Israeli perspective. The phrase “apartheid state,” for instance, appears only three times in more than 350 pages, and only within quotation marks that question the accuracy of the phrase. The authors take a more nuanced approach toward Israel, treating Barak as a “tragic figure” and criticizing the actions of current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for distancing his administration “from world Jewry” and escalating a situation that “threatens the future of Israel.” Engaging and well written, this work will also double as an effective primer on Israeli–Palestinian relations for those unfamiliar with the region’s complexities.
An impressively crafted, deeply personal history of Middle Eastern diplomacy.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798860652705
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
