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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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