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YITZHAK RABIN

Name: YITZHAK RABIN
Author: Itamar Rabinovich
ISBN: 978-0-300-21229-7

SOLDIER, LEADER, STATESMAN

by Itamar Rabinovich ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2017

Ideologues may well find reason to argue with the biography’s analysis of its subject’s life and death, but it puts the...

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | MODERN | WORLD

- BOOK REVIEW
SYRIAN REQUIEM
by Itamar Rabinovich & Carmit Valensi

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BRINK OF PEACE
by Itamar Rabinovich

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)