Randolph Churchill sat at home and tuned in on one the recent Israeli-Arab conflict. His son Winston, a journalist, covered the week of the war at the front. Their chronicle begins with a quick, lucid historical briefing which owes much to Christopher Sykes' Crossroads to Israel. Then it delves into the Aqaba crisis, the "six day war" proper, international reactions, and the aftermath through mid-July. Of particular interest: remarks on the dynamics of Israeli politics and the structure of the armed forces, the strains of mobilization and the reasons for their victory (a much swifter one than foreign observers realized at the time)...and a discriminating distribution of excerpts from speeches and interviews. The subject-matter is replete with preposterous moves by Nasser, but the pro-Israeli bias behind the authors' British detachment remains under control. They offer modest editorials about U.N. impotence, the refugee problem, and the prerequisites for a genuine peace. Having emphasized the responsibility of schizoid U.S. policy and Soviet arms-pushing for the militarization of this ancient strife, they conclude that the superpowers should stop "playing politics" in the Middle East. Little here for students of long-range causes and effects, but highly readable raw material for the under-informed and the battle replayers.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1967
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1967
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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