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
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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