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
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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