by Yitzhak Shamir with Rinna Samuel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 1994
With freelance writer Samuel, the former prime minister of Israel describes the context in which he developed his political views but reveals little new about himself. The gruff and taciturn Shamir was considered an interim prime minister after Menachem Begin stunned Israel with his sudden resignation in 1983; but Shamir survived attacks from within his own Likud party and from the opposition Labor Party for nine years. By the time voters finally forced him from office in 1992, Shamir was described as one of the best players ever in the rough-and- tumble of Israeli politics. In this autobiography, we learn a great deal about Shamir's staunch right-wing politics and the reasons his government spent billions solidifying the Israeli hold over the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. We learn far less about Shamir the man, who uses his life story as a polemic. He draws lessons in support of hard-line Zionist militancy from his youth in Poland; from his family's murder by the Nazis; and from his years as an operative in the most violent wing of the Mandate- era anti-British Jewish underground and, later, as an agent in the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. This is not a kind book. Shamir criticizes fellow rightists who don't share his views, and he characterizes his lifelong fight with opponents to the left as a ``dispute between those who believed in the immediate gain and were...willing to settle for the least and those who believed that they were responsible to future generations and bound...to hold out for the most.'' He remains closed-mouthed about his clandestine years, only justifying in some detail his already-known involvement in two celebrated political murders of the 1940s: of Britain's Lord Moyne and the UN's Count Bernadotte. A useful tool for opponents of the land-for-peace policies of the current Israeli government, but less useful to students of Israeli history or of Yitzhak Shamir.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-96825-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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