A lucid, valuable text about a homeland that may not yet be a light unto the nations but is surely unique.
The story of a unique nation as it grew from a dream to a world presence.
Brenner (Chair, Israel Studies/American Univ.; A Short History of the Jews, 2010, etc.) cogently sketches the unlikely achievements and unexpected trials of the State of Israel as it celebrates its 70th anniversary. At the First Zionist Congress, just 50 years before the Jewish state was established by the U.N., Theodor Herzl brought prayers of millennia down to Earth. As the author shows, there were certainly diverse places for a homeland to be (Africa, South America, Tasmania, as well as the Holy Land) and divergent paths it might take. Some favored autonomy after centuries of anti-Semitism, while others urged assimilation; labor had its proletarian views, and others stressed politics. Visionaries foresaw a land, different than any other, that would fulfill the ancient mission to be “a light unto the nations,” while some simply wanted a nation like any other. Unlike Herzl, some saw that displaced Arabs would not be pleased with the Jewish return to the biblical land of their fathers. The atrocities of the Holocaust clarified the urgency of a Jewish homeland, but who would be considered Jewish? Would it be a secular or religious land? An independent nation or a commonwealth? Brenner answers these questions and more in this concise text. The Six-Day War gave some Israelis the notion of a greater Israel, and religious settlers moved across the latest borders. The Yom Kippur War engendered an Arab summit’s adamant “three no’s”: no peace, no negotiation, no recognition. American evangelicals, anticipating the “end of days,” fell in love with Israel, and Russian immigrants and African lost tribes became Israelis. Startup technology and skyscrapers thrive in secular Tel Aviv, while world religions are at home among Jerusalem’s ancient stones; throughout the land, tourists mingle with soldiers on patrol.
A lucid, valuable text about a homeland that may not yet be a light unto the nations but is surely unique.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17928-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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