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
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
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