Five long, only fitfully fruitful conversations between Israel’s former prime minister who was the long-time rival to, ultimate collaborator with, and successor to the slain Yitzhak Rabin, and a Paris-based former Newsweek correspondent and novelist. Peres reveals a number of fascinating facts of which all but a handful of readers will have been unaware. For example, during Israel’s War of Independence, the Israeli forces executed one of its members allegedly spying for the British, only to learn later that he was innocent. Like Henry Kissinger, Peres has his share of bon mots, such as saying of Yasir Arafat that —when it comes to facts, he prefers to be a sort of Chagall—things can float around.— At times, Peres’s reflections are highly insightful, even profound, such as this on the Jews: —We—re a dissatisfied people, a people that makes demands on itself, a people that the only electricity it knows is high-tension—there is no low tension in Jewish energy.— Unfortunately, he also is sometimes prone, as his critics claim, to viewing both the past and present through rose-colored lenses; for example, he makes the dubious assertion that —when we left power [May 1996], the trust [between Israel and its partners in the peace process] was full. I think even today we enjoy a great deal of trust among the Arabs. Among the Palestinians.” His impressions of world political leaders he has met are both replete with colorful anecdotes and often superficial. Peres and Littell’s book also could have used better organization—their conversations sometimes seem rambling, flitting from topic to topic. Peres, of course, is still too close to his own very eventful life to provide real autobiographical perspective with critical depth. This book, entertaining and occasionally instructive as it is, underscores the need for a good biography of one of Israel’s most important leaders.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8018-5928-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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