A slender but important contribution to a discourse that needs more champions.
A humane call for peace in the Middle East by the widow of the assassinated Egyptian president.
Anwar Sadat was murdered on October 6, 1981, by what Jehan Sadat (A Woman of Egypt, 1987) calls “Islamic fanatics who believed that the peace he forged with Israel would perish along with him.” They had reason for that belief, since peace has proved elusive—though, the author argues, the 1979 Egypt-Israeli treaty has held. Sadat, who divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Cairo, traces much of the impetus for Islamic fundamentalism to the 1967 war, a humiliating experience for the Arab nations arrayed against Israel—but, in the eyes of some, a sign of God’s disfavor that required a “return to the faith as it was practiced in the Prophet’s day.” The Egyptian victory over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War did nothing to turn the tide of fundamentalism, especially after Anwar Sadat, by his widow’s account, took the occasion to relax tensions and seek an avenue to peaceful coexistence. The fundamentalist war has now widened to include the Western powers, which, notes the author, affords another occasion—for the Islamic faithful to repudiate the extremism of Osama bin Laden and company and “safeguard the ideals that Islam enjoins: compassion, social justice, and tolerance.” In turn, the West must “look beyond the lunatic fringe” by, among other things, rejecting the notion of the “clash of civilizations.” That flawed theory, she argues, presupposes that Islam is monolithic, stagnant and incapable of change. Sadat’s sentiments are wise and welcome, though she recognizes that there are many obstacles toward Western-Islamic and Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, not least of them the status of Jerusalem, which, she writes, must be made “safe and open to all believers.” Sadat argues that people throughout the Middle East want peace; only politicians and puritans do not.
A slender but important contribution to a discourse that needs more champions.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9219-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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