A revealing account of a 25-year career in the Israeli special forces. Betser joins Israeli warriors like Dayan, Eitan, Kahalani, and Sharon, who have collaborated with American writers to produce chest-thumping biographies featuring their contributions in Israel's major wars. This book differs in that Betser, fighting as a member and then leader of Israel's top anti-terrorist commando unit, largely describes the planning and execution of missions between the wars. Co-author Rosenberg does not have to exaggerate Betser's dramatic life, but as a thriller writer (The Cutting Room, 1993, etc.), he adds some necessary tension and plotting to Betser's curt, military description. Making up for dry and self- serving passages (``when you serve as a model, you're a commander and not a soldier'') are running narratives of bravado behind Egyptian lines in the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War, a mission to kidnap Syrian generals in Lebanon, the assassination of PLO planners of the Munich Olympics massacre, the Entebbe hostage rescue, and more. Betser was a natural for the Entebbe mission, since he had trained Idi Amin's forces in an earlier Uganda stint. Anecdotes from Africa show Betser overpaying servants and saving elephants from the rocket grenades of his trainees. Betser loves danger too much to convince us that he misses his ailing wife and Nahalal farm, but he does have the integrity to criticize incompetence in the Israeli Defense Forces. He is harsh about the political factors that created 2,569 casualties in the Yom Kippur War and painfully aware of the mistakes that cost the life of Yoni Netanyahu, the only Israeli soldier killed at Entebbe. It is Rosenberg, we suspect, who tries to make Betser into a ``secret dove'' in the introduction and epilogue. Secret Soldier adds much to our understanding of Israel's covert fighting arm.
Pub Date: June 18, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-637-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
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