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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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