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ISRAEL AND EUROPE

AN APPRAISAL IN HISTORY

Since the Yom Kippur War, the overwhelming amount of diplomatic “action” surrounding Israel has involved the US. But during the first half (1941—73) of the Jewish state’s existence, the European powers were crucial to its economic and military survival, as related here. Veteran scholar Sachar (Modern History/George Washington Univ.; Farewell Espa§a: The World of the Sephardim Remembered, 1994, etc.) rightly focuses almost exclusively on the four postwar European powers: Britain, France, West Germany, and the former USSR. Thus, for example, the Wiedergutmachung agreement (on reparations for the Holocaust), negotiated in 1952 between David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer, and bitterly opposed by Menachem Begin, was absolutely essential to the fledging state’s ability to absorb hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, develop new industry, and help tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors bear difficult economic conditions. Significant military aid from Bonn was forthcoming from the Adenauer era through that of Heinrich Kohl. In the mid-’50s, Paris helped Jerusalem to develop its air force and provided men and materials to build the country’s nuclear reactor in Dimona. Although he emphasizes diplomatic relations, including recently abortive European attempts to play a mediating role between Israel and the Palestinians, Sachar also probes the sharp upsurge in economic trade between Israel and the European Community, which has grown more than tenfold over the past 25 years. Unfortunately, too little here details the attitudes of major European intellectuals and religious leaders toward the Jewish state. In addition, Sachar’s pronounced “dovish” and anticlerical sentiments occasionally intrude, as when he asks: “Would the Israeli people survive a third generation only by maintaining a state of siege, retreating between a wall of parochialist suspicion and fundamentalist exclusivity?” However, these flaws pale in comparison to Sachar’s achievement: A solid, even pathbreaking book that covers a great deal of ground while remaining accessible to the general reader.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-679-45434-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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