An assiduous assault on the management of the apparently defunct peace process that has eluded Israel and Palestine.
With this earnest addition to the expanding shelf of commentary on the seemingly irresoluble Arab-Israeli conflict, journalist Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, offers, under the rubric of “Forcing Compromise” (the first third of the book), a detailed history of failed efforts to reach accord in the Holy Land. The problem is more than settlements, recognition of the State of Israel, the eventual status of Jerusalem, or even the number of casualties. It is well-earned distrust on both sides. Writing mostly of Israeli activities and American reactions, Thrall reviews the failures of Camp David, the Wye River meetings, and the Oslo agreements. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Benjamin Netanyahu were and are wrong; ditto negotiators Marin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and John Kerry. So, too, in various ways, were many American presidents who were, in the author’s view, too easy on the Israelis. Thrall proposes increased American and European pressure on the parties without elaborating on what the pressure would be or how it would work. Meanwhile, Arabs and Israelis accept the status quo as their best alternative. The remainder of the book consists of reprints of reviews and essays published elsewhere. The author provides copious footnotes (with many secondary sources cited), and he frequently mentions “Mandatory Palestine” in comparison to the Jewish state. The looming Arab nations in the neighborhood and the Arab League’s support of Hamas (which runs Gaza and whose goal is still destruction of “the Zionist entity”) are not recognized as threats to peace. Certainly, each party faces legitimate, fundamental problems: rockets, suicide bombers, checkpoints, land grabs, and internecine conflicts. However, as earnest as he is in illuminating the problems, Thrall remains partial and selective in probing them.
A troubling and truculent history of the still-stalemated search for peace in the Middle East.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-709-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | WORLD | WORLD | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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