Sometimes reading like official government propaganda for the 50th anniversary of Israeli statehood, Bar-Zohar’s collection of paeans to Zionist sacrifice and courage nonetheless forms an impressive statement about a beleaguered people’s will to exist. A bestseller in Israel, Bar-Zohar’s anthology of biographical essays covers a century of brave actions. Heroes before the founding of the State of Israel include soldier and pioneer Joseph Trumpeldor, whose celebrated quotation “It is good to die for our country” has echoed down through Israeli history. Other “trailblazers” of the years 1897—1939 and wartime heroes 1939—1947 are Sarah Aronson of the underground organization known as NILI; British captain Orde Wingate, who told his men, “You are the first soldiers of the Jewish army”; Hannah Senesh, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary; and the Warsaw Ghetto fighter Morechai Anielewicz. To the anthology’s credit, both women and men are represented, as well as non-warrior’s (like Janusz Korczak, the “father to orphans” who perished in Treblinka death camp) and the little-known, like Meir “Zaro” Zorea, the farmer turned reluctant fighter and politician, who is Israel’s equivalent of the emperor Cincinnatus. Most of the writers of these biographical sketches are familiar, and several are major war heroes and/or political leaders, including Raful Eitan, Itzhak Navon, Shevach Weiss, Itzhak Shamir, Uzi Narkiss, Zevulun Hammer, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, Chaim Herzog, Ezer Weizmann, Ehud Barak, Avigdor Kahalani, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Some of the author-subject match-ups are intriguing, such as having Shimon Peres write about Entebbe rescue hero Yoni Netanyahu, who’s brother (Benjamin) beat Peres at the polls. The reader who makes it through these 50 biographies gets a front-row view of the struggles and sacrifices that have contributed to Israel’s improbable survival. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52358-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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