Fairly interesting as a family saga, but stridently unhelpful as analysis.
Bound-to-be-controversial argument that “Zionism has coursed through the [Jewish] diaspora like a poison.”
“The blindness of American and British Jews to the criminality of Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians beggars belief,” continues Marqusee (Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, 2005, etc.) in a passage of characteristically overheated rhetoric. In the eyes of this secular, agnostic, yet still Jewish commentator, Palestinians are simply victims of Zionist oppression. He firmly rejects the charge that anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism or an example of “Jewish self-hatred.” He resents “the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere,” offering his family history as an instance of the complicated nature of Jewish identity. Marqusee devotes the bulk of the book to the story of his maternal grandfather, Edward V. Morand, a complex, belligerent liberal active in New York leftist politics before, during and after World War II. A champion of intermarriage, assimilation and tolerance, EVM (as his grandson calls him), became a steely Zionist as well, and Marqusee describes his 1948 editorials in support of Israel’s creation as providing “a slow-motion, close-up view of a man of conscience committing a colossal historic error.” In support of his own inflexible opposition to the state of Israel, a disaffection nursed since his teens, Marqusee offers selective historical tidbits. Valid points about Jewish racism against Arabs and the moral ambiguities of the Six-Day War are compromised by the author’s refusal to acknowledge that there are militant jihadists who call not just for the destruction of Israel but for the death of all Jews everywhere. Self-righteous and reductive, his polemic won’t convince anyone not already in his camp. It also seems unlikely that EVM would agree with his grandson’s contention that “my anti-Zionist politics are actually an evolution of your legacy, working its way through another half-century of history.”
Fairly interesting as a family saga, but stridently unhelpful as analysis.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84467-214-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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