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 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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