The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) constructs an innovative textbook juxtaposing the historical narratives of two peoples in seemingly endless conflict.
Developed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers, this text will prove useful not just to the young, but to anyone who quails at the thought of even attempting to unravel the knotty history of the Middle East. Under PRIME’s auspices, editors Adwan (Education/Bethlehem Univ.), Bar-On (now deceased) and Naveh (U.S. History/Tel Aviv Univ.), recognizing that the hostilities run deep and the divisions remain bitter, have set aside any attempt at consensus. They have “settled” instead for dual, oftentimes dueling, narratives of Israeli and Palestinian history, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through 2000, the end of the Clinton administration and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. On alternate pages, literally “side by side,” the editors present both the Palestinian and Israeli versions of significant events that have marked the fraught decades of the 20th century. This device—along with a short introduction explaining their methodology—helps demonstrate the scrupulousness of their enterprise and underscores the differences between the parties, but it unfortunately makes for cumbersome reading. Alternate chapters would have served just as well to illustrate the stark divisions between these longtime antagonists. One side’s “War of Independence” is the other’s “catastrophe”; for Israel, the 1967 Six-Day War was “a huge victory in a war it didn’t initiate or intend,” where the Palestinians see it as an act of pure “aggression”; for the Israelis, America prosecuted the Gulf War to “maintain stability in the Middle East, “ understanding “its first priority was to achieve a political order acceptable to all sides,” while the Palestinians condemn the U.S. for using “its achievements in the war to enhance its hegemony even on its European allies.” Readers shouldn’t expect fine writing; this is a committee project where the goal is to avoid the flashy or the incendiary, to present, as honestly as possible, each side’s point of view. A small but important step, if not toward peace, then perhaps toward understanding.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-683-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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