Ideologues may well find reason to argue with the biography’s analysis of its subject’s life and death, but it puts the...
A political biography of a pragmatic centrist who paid with his life when the center could not hold.
It is almost impossible to write anything about the Middle East in general—and Israel in particular—that is not contentious, and this biography of Israel’s first native-born prime minister, however measured its tone, necessarily has its own perspective and point of view. Israel Institute president Rabinovich (Israel and the Arab Turmoil, 2014, etc.) served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, just as his subject had before him, and was appointed by Rabin to be chief negotiator with Syria. He plainly sees the rise of the radical right as responsible both for Rabin’s assassination and for his succession by the still-controversial (and still-in-power) Benjamin Netanyahu, though he stops short of implicating the latter in the former. Rabinovich does his best to elucidate the complexities of his subject, “a political dove and a military hawk,” amid the political complexities of Israel and the United States as well as the relations between the two. He also shows how any sort of peace or reconciliation within Israeli politics alone may be difficult to achieve, let alone sustain. Of Rabin’s relationship with the more conservative Shimon Peres, whom the prime minister felt compelled to appoint as his Minister of Defense, the author writes, “this was the first round of a joint journey between two political Siamese twins that would last for twenty-one years—twins who both disliked and appreciated each other, competed and partnered, eventually realizing they were joined at the hip and bound to collaborate with each other.” Rabin’s rise to power also found him navigating bumpy relationships with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan (both subjects of previous biographies within the publisher’s Jewish Lives series).
Ideologues may well find reason to argue with the biography’s analysis of its subject’s life and death, but it puts the complexities of his career and achievement in fresh perspective.Pub Date: March 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-21229-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 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.
