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SHALOM, FRIEND

THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF YITZHAK RABIN

An absorbing portrait of the remarkable life of the late Israeli Prime Minister. David Horovitz, managing editor of The Jerusalem Report, deftly assembled the research of over two dozen of the Report's writers to produce a biography of Rabin that focuses on the recent peace process and the circumstances that led to his assassination. Earlier events in Rabin's life are covered in full—his early years in the Palmach, his military accomplishments in both the War of Independence and the Six Day War, and his stint as Israel's ambassador to the US—but this book's strength lies in its gripping analysis of Rabin's relationship with both the Palestinians and with Israeli settlers in the contested territory of the West Bank. Until the outbreak of the Intifada, Rabin paid almost no attention to the Palestinians. He knew little about them and had no interest in knowing more. His solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict leaned to the ``Jordanian Option,'' with its provision for continued Israeli settlement along the Jordan Valley. When the Intifada did break out in 1987, Rabin, misreading the Palestinians, dismissed it as insignificant. Yet it was precisely the Intifada that caused Rabin to realize that the Palestinians were an enemy with whom he would have to negotiate. The Intifada ``had turned the Palestinian people into a proper enemy. And, as such, they earned the right in Rabin's eyes to a proper peace.'' And if Rabin lacked insight into the Palestinians, he had even less into the West Bank settlers. He perceived most of them as obstacles to peace, and ``was positively infuriated by the vigilante elements among them.'' And as a secular Jew, Rabin had ``few sentiments for the area's past.'' It may well have been, in fact, the chasm between the secular Rabin and the religious nationalists that set the scene for his tragic death. Well-researched, engrossing, and admirably objective, Shalom, Friend is a significant contribution.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 1-55704-287-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Newmarket Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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