A highly provocative, if one-sided, perspective not often heard in mainstream discourse.
A prolonged diatribe depicting Israel and the Jews as the greatest obstacles to peace in the Middle East and to the inevitable emergence of stabilized, united Arab states.
Cohen is beyond outspoken in this book that is far more about Jews than Arabs. His indictment of Israel as a nuclear bully and criminal oppressor of the Palestinians—willingly abetted by a United States controlled by influential American Jews—crosses over into denunciation. “The rest of the world is correct to view these two rogue governments as direct threats to life on earth,” he writes. He depicts Jews as a tiny, ultra-privileged demographic of self-serving believers in their own superiority and as a people with no empathy for the non-Jewish majority. In Cohen’s view, American soldiers fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan protecting the interests of Israel, not of their own country. “It is a totally new world being managed by corporations rather than governments,” he writes. “Jews control most of these corporations. This means that everything will be tilted in favor of Israel and its security and future in the Middle East.” Jewish control of the media and the culture, he says, assures these realities will be seen as unfit for public discussion. The author’s preoccupation with these themes overshadows his prediction of a new Arab coalition of still Islamic but modernized states, with Iran included and Israel withered away to nothing. “There is no place in the Middle East for a Jewish state,” he writes. “From almost all perspectives, Israel is an unnatural implant in the Middle East.” Jews, he says, would do better as they always have, living in other countries, including those with Islamic majorities. And as American influence in the region wanes, they may have no other choice. In his bombastic style, Cohen scrupulously provides examples and references for all he asserts. He provides no biography and avoids revealing any personal information. Is he himself Jewish? He doesn’t say, though he does seem to suggest that only Jews dare speak the truth about Jews.
A highly provocative, if one-sided, perspective not often heard in mainstream discourse.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496934949
Page Count: 452
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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