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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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