A brief but poignant work of memoir and history.
In a posthumous publication, the eminent former Israeli leader delivers a heartfelt appeal to the best in the Israeli Jewish character.
Although he was an early proponent of a vigorous Israeli defense system, aviation industry, and Dimona nuclear reactor, Peres (Ben-Gurion, 2011, etc.), who died in 2016, was known in his later career as a peace seeker. In this nonpolemical book, he candidly addresses this contradiction (“it was not me that changed; it was the situation that changed”). Born in 1923 in Poland, where, as a boy, the dream of Zionism caught his imagination, Peres was particularly inspired by the wisdom of his revered grandfather, who told the 11-year-old when he emigrated, “Promise me you’ll always remain Jewish.” A member of Ben Shemen Youth Village, farming on the frontier and also having to defend it from attack, Peres was caught up in the youth movement’s debates of how the country should operate politically, and he became a young leader, catching the eye of the legendary David Ben-Gurion. The author actively campaigned for statehood, and that meant having to prepare for a war against the Arabs. “What good is the birth of a new state,” Ben-Gurion’s logic ran, “if it’s immediately strangled in its crib?” Peres was appointed to transform the Haganah (later to become the Israel Defense Forces), and he comically depicts how he purchased arms directly from Czechoslovakia, then France, before the U.S. became a military supplier. Regarding the building of Dimona, the author cites Israeli policy of “nuclear ambiguity” as the effective deterrent in their enemies’ “belief that they could overpower us.” While Peres offers a self-glorying depiction of his role in the disastrous 1956 Suez Crisis, his desire to make peace with the Palestinians was sincere (he won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat), and his drive to render the country a land of high-tech startups was truly visionary. Ultimately, Peres champions Israel as an immigrant nation strengthened by its “culture of chutzpah.”
A brief but poignant work of memoir and history.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256144-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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