Somewhat arid, but a policy wonk’s dream, full of historical data and the implications for war and peace in the world’s most...
A close analysis of the late Jordanian ruler, who walked a fine line in his efforts to promote peace in the Middle East.
Ashton (International History/London School of Economics and Political Science; Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence, 2002) writes from a scholarly point of view, complementing but not overshadowing Avi Shlaim’s journalistic—and far more fluent—biography Lion of Jordan (2008). Indeed, both authors cover much of the same ground, though Ashton is less eager than Shlaim to blame the failure of peacemaking on Israeli intransigence. Instead, Ashton points to the endless complexity of regional politics, particularly in the quicksand of the Cold War, when Iraq, for instance, was alternately allied with Egypt, then Egypt’s rival, then Saudi Arabia’s friend, then Saudi Arabia’s mortal enemy. King Hussein faced considerable opposition from his Hashemite cousins in Saudi Arabia (it did not help matters, in that regard, that the ruling Arab families of the region are related), some of whom argued that “the Jordanian branch of the Hashemite family was not fit to rule, and that the kingdom should have reverted to the Iraqi branch.” In the years following the 1967 War, King Hussein made Jordan something of a buffer state between Saudi Arabia and Israel, requiring delicate negotiations and courting plenty of opposition, including several attempted military coups. By Ashton’s account, though, some of his toughest opposition came from the American intelligence community, which had its own ideas about how to settle differences in the region. Compared to CIA Director Richard Helms, Israeli leader Moshe Dayan seemed an angel of reconciliation. It took sustained effort on the king’s part to steer Jordan out of the gunsights when “his two former friends, Saddam Hussein and George Bush,” went to war in 1991—an episode in which, Ashton reveals, Mikhail Gorbachev offered the Soviet Union as a back channel ally to the United States and Israel, which will come as news to many readers.
Somewhat arid, but a policy wonk’s dream, full of historical data and the implications for war and peace in the world’s most volatile region.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-300-09167-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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