A journalistic tour-de-force, and a sobering reminder of how little has been achieved during 60 years of Israeli efforts in...
Despite the title, Israel’s disastrously botched 1997 attempt to murder a key Hamas leader plays a minor role in this gripping and discouraging history.
Readers will receive one of many jolts as Sydney Morning Herald chief correspondent McGeough (Manhattan to Baghdad, 2003, etc.) reveals that America and Israel welcomed Islamic fundamentalism to the occupied territories during the 1960s and ’70s, pleased that these pious Muslims despised Yassar Arafat and his secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Khalid Mishal was 11 when his devout family fled to Kuwait after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1967. Brilliant in school, he taught at Kuwait University from 1978 to 1984 while leading members of the Islamic Association of Palestinian Students in often violent clashes against students who supported the PLO. He was involved with Hamas from its founding in 1987, and by 1991, when he moved to Jordan, he was one of the organization’s leaders. Hamas soon launched a murderous campaign of suicide bombings, which led to a equally murderous Israeli response, including the assassination of Hamas leaders. After 30 years of denouncing Arafat as a terrorist, American leaders hoped he would lead the patchy new Palestinian state, but it was too late. While the PLO was largely a guerrilla organization, Hamas spent 20 years providing clinics, schools and food to Palestinian civilians, social services that brought their reward in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Outraged that voters had chosen the wrong people, America cut off aid, thereby falling in line with Israel’s policy of encouraging Palestinians to seek peace by making them as miserable as possible.
A journalistic tour-de-force, and a sobering reminder of how little has been achieved during 60 years of Israeli efforts in Palestine.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-325-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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