A valuable contribution to the literature of conflict resolution and Middle East studies.
A firsthand account of the negotiations that led to the establishment of peace, however tenuous, between Israel and Palestine.
"Haunted by the many opportunities for peace that had been missed in the past," journalist and Israeli Labour Party official Beilin took it upon himself in the mid-1980s to bring an end to the decades-long war between his nation and its Arab neighbors. In this memoir, he recounts, with a surfeit of detail, the long conversations with peace activists, diplomats, and friends-of-friends that helped set in motion the Oslo peace process (which brought unusual concessions from all sides—including Israel's agreement to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and to permit the establishment of a Palestinian state). The negotiations, in time, led to a Washington-brokered meeting of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat. Their handshake on the White House steps, Beilin wryly notes, "did not cause the pillars of the universe to sway," but it did lead to Arafat's being condemned by members of his Palestine Liberation Organization and Rabin's being assassinated by a right-wing extremist. That murder, Beilin writes, "turned everything upside down" and threatened to undo the provisional accords; Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, was reluctant to accept his predecessor's compromises, but in the end a difficult peace was made—and so far it seems to be holding. Beilin wisely observes that peace is only a partial solution to all the region's woes. "This isn't a state of bliss," he adds. "It's just normal." Normal or not, the peace Beilin helped bring about requires Israel and Palestine alike to come to a new sense of self-identity, one that does not presuppose a constant state of war with someone else. That change in thinking, Beilin insists, may take time and effort, but there is no alternative. "Having embarked on the Oslo process," he concludes, "we have no option but to continue it."
A valuable contribution to the literature of conflict resolution and Middle East studies.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-297-64316-9
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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