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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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