Lahav, a Boston University law professor raised in Israel, provides a textured portrait of the life, times, and legal decisions of American-raised Simon Agranat, former chief justice of Israel's Supreme Court. Lahav's Israeli-American perspective helps her analyze the profound influence of progressive American ideology and legal writing on Israel's most prolific jurist. During Agranat's tumultuous years on Israel's Supreme Court (194876), he even cited Abraham Lincoln while shaping Israel's judicial history. Agranat is seen as the pivotal force who ``steered the Israeli judiciary away from legal formalities and toward a more substantive understanding of the meaning of law.'' Occasionally, Agranat disappoints Lahav's own, more liberal stances on separation of church and state and the rights of Israeli Arabs to mount political challenges to the Jewish state. For all its reforms, the Agranat Court could not tolerate Palestinian nationalism. Lahav sets Agranat's most public episode, the Eichmann trial of 1960, within the ideological context of universal ``Utopian'' Zionism's struggle with the insular ``Catastrophic'' Zionism; the latter wins out as Agranat betrays his former opposition to the death penalty as a lesson to the world. Lahav sees the Agranat Commission in the wake of the Yom Kippur War as the justice's greatest challenge and legacy. In examining the reasons for national unreadiness in this disastrous surprise attack, Agranat secured both his integrity and his unpopularity. Most Israelis identified with the army (which the commission pilloried) and resented Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan (who were vindicated). The book offers a unique view of Israeli legal history and is far too readable (and relevant) to be dismissed as simply a judicial biography. (11 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-520-20595-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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