An inviting exercise in autobiography by Israel's defensive foreign minister. Even before the current peace process and peace prize, Shimon Peres was known for his paradoxical traits: an optimistic dove in Arab relations who nonetheless founded Israel's ``Doomsday'' atomic program. Readers who look for clues into Peres's complex psyche here will not be disappointed. An early influential headmaster of his ``believed that Zionism should and must offer far-reaching concessions to the Arabs,'' and his mentor, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unlike Golda Meir and others, fought hard to accept the partition plan that offered Israel a fraction of its present size. Peres was used to accommodation, as he made room for Shulamit Aloni (currently his troublesome coalition partner) in his honeymoon tent after wooing his wife with readings from Das Kapital. By age 26, Peres was already a key defense operative, but he lost many political friends by sticking with Ben-Gurion's revolt from the Labor party. Long before he would stun his nation and the world with his secret diplomatic coup in Oslo, Peres was unnerving his superiors with under-the-table deals for weaponry, the most significant being the atomic reactor project arranged with France. Peres enjoys far better relations with Israel-basher Bruno Kreisky and Israeli-killer Yassir Arafat than he does with Israel's current leader, Yitzhak Rabin. Peres swears he ``never felt any animosity'' from Rabin, yet he often responds to charges in the prime minister's ``tendentious autobiography.'' Young Shimon Persky took the name Peres because one naturalist rendered this biblical Hebrew term to mean eagle. As luck would have it, everyone else considers this bird to be a vulture. Fluid, factual, and occasionally anecdotal, this is a better- than-average campaign bio by yet another feuding Israeli hero of war and peace.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43617-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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