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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
