A sharp, fully fleshed, somewhat biased portrait of “one of the most fascinating and compelling figures to have appeared on...
Succinct biography of the “lone wolf” defense minister during Israel’s decisive first campaigns.
Bar-On (A Never-Ending Conflict: A Guide to Israeli Military History, 2004, etc.) states from the first sentence of this crisp, selective new biography that “the story of Moshe Dayan is the story of the State of Israel,” and thereby, this contains all of its inspiring, problematic and confounding mythology. Dayan (1915–1981), like Israel, was full of contradictions, which were part of his mystique and magnetism. The child of educated Ukrainian immigrants to Palestine committed to eking out a living on one of the earliest kibbutzim in Palestine, Dayan connected first and foremost with the land. His early experience in the farming cooperative involved the moshav, which his “trailblazer” parents forged, draining swamps and enduring Arab reprisals—an experience that would inform his later work as Israel’s minister of agriculture and his “lifelong ambivalence toward treatment of the Palestinians.” Dayan’s fearlessness, which verged on recklessness, characterized his youth, as he learned the basic rules of military field conduct in the fledgling Haganah and lost an eye during an invasion of Syria in 1941, after which he was convinced his military career was over. Occasionally recruited to quell the infighting from the Irgun, he found many of his old colleagues now commanders, and he hitched his star to David Ben-Gurion, who appointed him first as commander of Jerusalem, then head of the Israeli Defense Force, and later defense minister during the Six-Day War. Architect of the doomed reprisals policy along the borders, sidelined and vilified for his role in the Yom Kippur debacle, and unable to accept Palestinian autonomy, Dayan wrestled ceaselessly between hubris and humanity.
A sharp, fully fleshed, somewhat biased portrait of “one of the most fascinating and compelling figures to have appeared on Israel’s stage.”Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-14941-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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