Textually dense at times but effectively highlights the left-right division that is splitting much of the world.
The considerable effects of literature, music (popular and classical), and other arts on Americans’ attitudes about Israel.
Goldman (Religion/Middlebury Coll.; Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern Jewish Identity: Seven Twentieth-Century Converts, 2015, etc.) delivers a studied and sturdy look at what the subtitle promises. He also inserts elements of memoir, describing his youthful experiences in Israel, his time in the military there, and some negative reactions to his writing and talks about Israel’s rightward turn. (He is deeply concerned about the rise of the right and American evangelicals’ unquestioning support for it.) Although artists and their works are his principal focus, Goldman does not assume that readers know the history of the Middle East from the early 19th century. Consequently, in each chapter, he includes historical background of each period he discusses across the chronological narrative. We revisit the Ottoman Empire, the founding of the country after World War II, the Six-Day War, Camp David, the various Israeli political leaders throughout the decades—and much more. As a result, his discussions of the artists sometimes slip into the swelling undergrowth. He tells stories about Herman Melville—who visited the Middle East after the publication of Moby-Dick; the result of that journey was Clarel, his “book-length poem based on his Holy Land experiences”—and Mark Twain, whose travels, chronicled in The Innocents Abroad, 1869, began his rocket ride into international celebrity. Throughout, Goldman explores the works of a variety of luminaries, including Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, John Steinbeck, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, W.H. Auden, Johnny Cash, Madonna, and numerous others. But he also informs us about lesser-known events and people—e.g., the Adams Colony (1866), the building of the YMCA in Jerusalem (1933), and the life of Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes. Near the end, he has some critical words for Donald Trump.
Textually dense at times but effectively highlights the left-right division that is splitting much of the world.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4696-5241-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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