A famous singer brings joy and hope to beleaguered Israeli troops.
In October 1973, Syrian and Egyptian forces attacked Israel, starting the Yom Kippur War, and the “strange appearance” of a Leonard Cohen tour at the time has “lived on as underground history.” In this compelling book, award-winning journalist Friedman, a winner of the Sami Rohr Prize, among others, recounts in detail the desert war from the Israeli perspective and Cohen’s role in it. The singer was 39 when he traveled to Sinai, in the grip of drugs, anger, and frustration and disgusted by the music business. Friedman includes a previously unpublished manuscript, “livid and obscene,” that Cohen wrote after his trip to his “myth home,” as Cohen called it. “Cohen’s manuscript about the war tends to raise more questions than it answers,” writes the author. “He’s unwilling to explain directly what he was thinking.” Amid the fighting, it’s unclear exactly where and when the improvised concerts took place, but his first performance took place at Hatzor air base, where he wrote and performed “Lover Lover Lover.” At the time, Cohen wrote “Perhaps I can protect some people with this song.” Friedman includes many emotional reminiscences from soldiers who fought and attended the concerts, describing how much they appreciated the presence of Cohen, who asked them to use his Hebrew name: “ ‘Leonard’ was a foreigner. ‘Eliezer’ was a sibling.” Cohen sang “Suzanne” often—a version of it was then circulating in Hebrew—and he slept on the floor and ate combat rations like everyone else. One soldier said he “gave off an aura of good-heartedness, of unusual humanity.” Cohen told a reporter that he “came to raise their spirits, and they raised mine.” The brief tour wound down with stops at Gen. Ariel Sharon’s desert headquarters, the Sharm el-Sheikh airfield, and a spot outside Suez City. An engaging historical resurrection, the book also includes rare photos.
Cohen fans will savor this little-known footnote in the singer’s life.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954118-07-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Categories: HISTORY | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | JEWISH | WORLD
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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