A collection of prose pieces focusing on the nature of Israeli society and its relations with Arabs within and without its borders. Israeli novelist and short-story writer Hareven (Twilight and Other Stories, 1992, etc.) writes disapprovingly of the values and ethics of modern Israel. She characterizes the predominant mood of the country as shallow and transient; consumerism predominates, and a selfish subjectivity runs rampant. Thousands of people are killed on the road by ``dilettante drivers.'' The ``dilettante rabbis'' of the ultranationalist Gush Emunim forget that the Torah rejects collective punishment and urges us to respect the rights of non- Jews. Hareven feels that her contemporaries have lost a reverence for the past, exemplified by the Tel Aviv municipality's demolishing its first school, the Gymnasium, to build yet another shopping mall: ``The shmatte business and its attendant fashions take precedence over a historical educational institution.'' Consumerism and superficiality, she feels, characterize the new Israeli. The root of all this, insists Hareven, is the nation's refusal to give up its historical victim status. Israeli Jews think that they are entitled to let loose, free of moral or historical bounds, and to commit atrocities like exiling Arabs from their homes and appropriating their lands. Turning from national pathology to policy, Hareven contends that Israel must evacuate the administered territories, since the alternative is ``permanent potential for war.'' While much of Hareven's writing offers insights and provocation, she tends to blithely dismiss, rather than debate, differing opinions. In her passion to focus on the humanistic concerns of Judaism, she pushes over ritual pillars such as dietary laws and Sabbath observance as not necessary to ``the framework of basic Judaism.'' A thoughtful, disturbing, though often simplistically one- sided view of a complex country and its heterogeneous people.
Pub Date: May 8, 1995
ISBN: 1-56279-072-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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