Finally available in English, this skillfully written antiwar text is assuredly a classic.
A remarkable account of the bloody war for the establishment of the Jewish state, written by a young soldier in the midst of conflict.
Now an octogenarian and prominent peace activist, Avnery was a skinny young squad leader in 1948, when he sent unauthorized newspaper dispatches describing the historic struggle to relieve Jerusalem as it was besieged by Arab forces. Published in 1949 in Hebrew under the title In the Fields of the Philistines, the first part of this present book was an instant bestseller. It is stark in its graphic depiction of bullets, blood, fellowship and endurance as polyglot raw recruits, including many who had just endured the Holocaust, became instant veterans. It was a time when scarcely prepared soldiers went AWOL from training to join their comrades at the front line. They were ill-equipped and outnumbered, fighting tanks with Molotov cocktails and machine guns. The life of a disputed new nation and its people were in the balance, so they attacked the combined armies of the Arab world. Catastrophe would result for one side or the other—indeed, “catastrophe” is now the Arab description of those days. Shortly after In the Fields was published, feeling he could be more honest now that the war was over, Avnery began a second work, based on notes he made in the hospital while recovering from severe wounds. The Other Side of the Coin caused a huge scandal in Israel, and it’s easy to see why. Included as the second part of this English-language edition, it is a more terrible, more literary work, reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front. The pungent motif is sudden pain, grievous wounds and nasty death. Disdain for HQ, looting and wanton killing are common. “It is war. That means we have to kill each other.” Deep in the muddy wadis and out in the dry Negev, it was evil and awful, and Avnery has painted a candid, unforgettable picture of it. His remains a powerful, significant voice.
Finally available in English, this skillfully written antiwar text is assuredly a classic.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-85168-629-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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