A leading Israeli diplomat’s insider view of the intricate negotiations between his country and the Palestinians from May 1993, four months before the conclusion of the Oslo agreement, through May 1996 and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Savir, former Israeli consul-general in New York, became director general of his country’s Foreign Ministry under the late Yitzhak Rabin. When it became apparent that the secret Oslo talks begun in early 1993 had a real potential for a diplomatic breakthrough, he was named head of the Jewish state’s negotiations with the PLO, and then the Palestinian Authority, during the three-year period he chronicles. Norwegian mediators half-jokingly, half-seriously introduced his Palestinian counterpart, Abu Ala, to Savir as “your enemy number one.” The two often conveyed sharply conflicting views and instructions from their superiors, yet not only learned how to work together but developed a deep respect, even fondness, for each other. Savir is most revealing in relating how fraught with basic national yearnings and symbolism even the most seemingly technical issues became. The Israelis were desperate for security and an end to terror, the Palestinians equally insistent on not being condescended to or humiliated by the Israelis, and upon a recognition of the trappings of a national identity. Savir also writes with an admirable capacity to criticize Israeli leaders in a thoughtful and restrained way. For example, concerning Israel’s closure of the Gaza and West Bank borders and its concomitant focus on Arafat’s inadequate efforts to combat Palestinian terrorists, he acknowledges that “we tended to be so focused on the Palestinian leadership that we often failed to see Palestinian society as a community of needs and aspirations that its leaders must serve and reflect.” Passages like this will make Savir open to charges of not being a hard-headed enough diplomat and historian; others will rightfully praise him for possessing the skilled negotiator’s necessary qualities of empathy, vision, and an ability to compromise.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42296-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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