A desultory, episodic, and most unsatisfying peek at contemporary Israel.
A rather predictable Cook’s Tour of the Holy Land.
Orange (former Middle East correspondent for Tikkun) rehearses the tragedies of recent years—Baruch Goldstein’s attack on a mosque in Hebron, the murder of Rabin, etc.—and the attempts of well-meaning politicians to speed the peace process by the Oslo Accords. We eavesdrop on her conversations with politicians and other journalists. We meet a Palestinian grocery store owner and hear his thoughts on the intifada. We learn of her Israeli-born artist friend Yehuda’s nervousness about driving in East Jerusalem. We share a picnic lunch with a newly Orthodox, Moroccan-born Jew who has moved to a settlement near Tel Aviv. Occasionally, Orange’s invigorating prose brings to life the cast of characters we encounter, but too often she degenerates into comfortable stereotypes of Torah-obsessed rabbis and land-obsessed settlers. But even more uncomfortable than these lapses into cliché are Orange’s indulgence of her personal exploits—her romance, for example, or her concerns about her daughter Eliza’s inability to learn Hebrew (eventually Orange learns that Eliza is dyslexic). This marriage of memoir and current-events reportage is a stormy one, and she would have done well to stick with one or the other. Furthermore, readers may wish that Orange’s editor had taken a red pen to some of her attempts at profundity—such as her reflection, sparked by some musings about prisoners, that “our” relation to time may be “self-indulgent.” Orange’s account may remind readers of David Hare’s one-man play Via Dolorosa; that play, too, tried to introduce the audience to all perspectives, Israeli and Palestinian, and drew on conversations with both talking heads and ordinary Joes. But even Hare’s fiercest critics will find Orange less appealing.
A desultory, episodic, and most unsatisfying peek at contemporary Israel.Pub Date: June 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86951-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
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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