A fair portrait of a difficult, hard-nosed character who, like him or not, had enormous impact on 20th-century events.
The eminent Israeli journalist and historian chronicles the life of a driven leader who galvanized others to the exhausting, relentless pursuit of a state of Israel.
Born in Poland, David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) was, from an early age, laser-focused on the creation of a Jewish state, and he was often perceived as heartless, especially—tellingly—by those closest to him. Segev (Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, 2010, etc.) attributes this quality to the loss of his mother after another childbirth when he was 11, a trauma that colored all relationships Ben-Gurion had henceforth, especially those with women. Yet he also had an educated father who conducted legal business with Christians and established an early Zionist society in his Polish village which clearly influenced his son. The author clearly captures the relentless, rather oblivious quality of Ben-Gurion’s personality as well as his quixotic side. He left for Warsaw as a teen, before his close group of boyhood friends did, and while he was confident he would gain entrance to a technological school—in order to learn skills to aid the new Jewish state—he lacked the essential ambition to complete the work. Instead, he immersed himself in the socialist labor alternative to Zionism, the Bund, and honed his leadership skills. As a leader, he traveled to America and the European capitals, drumming up support for the Zionist cause. The rise of Hitler and Nazi aggression changed everything, and Ben-Gurion regarded the tragedy not in terms of numbers of Jews murdered but rather as a setback for gaining settlers for the state. The 1948 declaration of the Jewish state signaled a celebration for everyone except Ben-Gurion, who knew it meant war and the sacrifice of Jewish lives. Essentially, he sanctioned the policy of forcible removal of Arab villagers during the war of independence; afterward, he noted, “an Arab is first and foremost an Arab.” For him, there was no compromise, and the fortress mentality still festers to this day.
A fair portrait of a difficult, hard-nosed character who, like him or not, had enormous impact on 20th-century events.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-11264-6
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
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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