Sharon’s son provides a solid template on which subsequent biographers will have to build.
The life and times of Israel's warrior leader Ariel Sharon, chronicled by his son.
The author, an Israeli columnist, debuts as a biographer with unique access to his father's documents and diaries, friends and colleagues and family memories. What emerges is a multifaceted picture of an Israeli patriot, military leader and family man. Sharon was born in 1928 in pre-independence Palestine and rose to leadership from the Haganah resistance, the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces. The author recounts three phases in his father's career, starting with the rise of the paratrooper and antiterror specialist to military leadership, with the support of Israel's first Prime Minister Ben Gurion, and concluding with the leader whose contribution to the global war against terrorism transcended national borders. In the ’50s, Sharon was opposed by those with more formal training in the command structure. Later he ran afoul of the Israeli Labour Party establishment, with consequences for the conduct of the Yom Kippur War. The author also shows that during the Lebanon war in the ’80s, U.S. and Israeli policies were not always closely aligned, and that Israeli military objectives could be subordinated to U.S. global political strategies. Out of past conflicts came what Sharon and others considered to be “red lines in the sand”—no nuclear weapons in the hands of Arabs; no superpower-like balance of power in the area; preserve Israel's capability to respond to attacks. Documents highlight Sharon's relations with current leaders like Netanyahu, Peres, Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
Sharon’s son provides a solid template on which subsequent biographers will have to build.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-172150-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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