A humane, responsible entry in a discourse marked by irresponsible inhumanity.
“This is not an ordinary place you can map out with a surveyor’s rod.” So, in this engaging memoir, notes Palestinian intellectual, politician and peace activist Nusseibeh of his lost homeland.
As his narrative opens, Harvard- and Oxford-educated Nusseibeh, long an informal advisor to Yassir Arafat, is awaiting “The Old Man’s” funeral procession in Gaza. Arafat had headed the Palestinian Liberation Organization and, by default, the Palestinian people for more than 40 years, and now in his absence there is every danger of Hamas and other extremist groups taking over, a prospect Nusseibeh dreads. “Arafat was not your run-of-the-mill Arab despot,” he writes, though he faults the leader for lagging behind his people, who really did want peace with Israel, a fact the PLO head seemed unwilling to accept. Ordinary Israelis seemed of a similar mind, though, he writes, the original partition had built an unworkable mess into the process from the start. Along the course of his narrative, Nusseibeh’s wayward politics earn him a savage beating, attacked by a group of young men whose own leader, it develops, is connected to the Jordanian intelligence service. As he recounts, he was in as much danger of being killed by Israeli extremists as Palestinians, but still he advocated a two-state solution, rejecting the idea that Israel should be pushed into the sea and refusing to resort to such rhetoric as “the Zionist entity,” now favored by Hamas, al-Qaeda and company. For his sins, Nusseibeh, apparently without political ambitions, was appointed the PLO administrator over Jerusalem, even though, he recounts, he had many disagreements with Arafat; he vigorously pressed for approaching the post-9/11 American government with the aim of “reconstituting the Camp David alliance,” which, he charges, the Barak government repudiated. “Israelis and Palestinians,” he insists here, “are not enemies at all. . . . If anything, we are strategic allies”—allies who ought to be living at peace.
A humane, responsible entry in a discourse marked by irresponsible inhumanity.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-29950-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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
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