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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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