A meticulously detailed examination of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that doesn’t fully live up to its potential.
An exhaustive account of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks from the 2000 Camp David Summit to the present.
In his latest book, Ben-Ami, an Israeli historian and former diplomat, provides a nearly minute-by-minute chronicle of the failed 2000 summit and the many halting attempts at peace that sprang up in its wake. “This book should be read as an obituary to the two-state solution,” he writes, arguing that “it is about time that all stakeholders shift their attention to other possible scenarios.” Oscillating between the broad sweep of history and the fine-grained details of international negotiation, the book assumes a great deal of historical and political knowledge as well as a keen interest in the particulars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author digs deep into the varying definitions of sovereignty, territorial swaps in the West Bank, and the often conflicting interpretations of the Palestinian right of return. Aside from his depiction of Yasser Arafat—“an alley cat, proficient in the art of political survival, a man with a tactical cunning that frequently defeated his grand national vision”—Ben-Ami is almost always diplomatic in his assessment of his Palestinian counterparts, and he is often critical of right-wing Israeli politicians and policies. He calls Israeli discourse on Jerusalem “a pile of accepted lies” and argues that “the real existential threat facing Israel is not nuclear Iran; rather, it is to be found in the morally corrosive effects of the oppressive occupation of the Palestinian people.” Even so, the author is unable to escape the score-settling and mythologizing that doomed the Camp David Summit itself. In the final sections—which detail the two-state solution’s collapse as well as possible futures and corollaries—Ben-Ami arrives at the erudite and expansive synthesis readers are seeking. However, these pages feel rushed in comparison to the painstaking detail of the first half.
A meticulously detailed examination of the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that doesn’t fully live up to its potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-006047-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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