A revealing companion to Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom’s Ariel Sharon: A Life (2006).
Measured life of the Israeli politician who, perhaps more than any other, made his nation into a military power, even as he worked for peace.
Throughout his long life, writes Bar-Zohar (Lionhearts, 1998, etc.), Shimon Peres has labored to make Israel secure. The octogenarian, with “just a normal lust for power,” has been a prominent presence in the nation’s politics since long before there was a nation. Bar-Zohar traces his early involvement in the kibbutz experiment, where, as a young socialist, he won a place in the postwar conferences leading to the establishment of the Jewish state. He was a civilian in the war following the end of the Mandate, however, which diminished his stature somewhat for years to come; independent of that, he was beginning to attract powerful enemies for many reasons, among them Golda Meir, who, it seems, could not bear even to be on the same airplane as Peres. (Said sometime Peres ally Teddy Kollek, “She doesn’t so much conduct a foreign policy as maintain a hate-list.”) In various roles, from minor official to defense minister, Peres worked diligently to establish alliances with the Western powers but was often rebuffed—particularly by the U.S. when it came to securing both conventional weaponry and nuclear capability, for which reason Peres turned to France and got what he needed. Military strength established, as a member of Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet and later as head of state, he “adopted moderate positions toward the Arab world and the Palestinians in particular,” a conciliation much at odds with stances he had taken previously. In 2006, at the height of the campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, he was busily promoting a plan for a “Corridor of Peace” along the valley of the Jordan River, where Palestinians, Jordanians and Israelis would live and work together.
A revealing companion to Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom’s Ariel Sharon: A Life (2006).Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6292-6
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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