To do otherwise is to invite unsettling scenarios, each carefully considered. Those seeking either peace or regime change...
Is Iran a nuclear threat? According to Israeli journalist Melman and Iranian-born political analyst Javedanfar, the answer is a resounding yes.
Back in Iran’s pro-American and even pro-Israeli days, the Shah Reza Pahlavi had risked alienating both allies by funding an aggressive program to develop nuclear capabilities. Somewhat ironically, when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in February 1979, he considered nuclear weapons a symptom of “imperialism and the ‘decadent’ culture of the West.” By the authors’ account, there are many reasons to believe that the ayatollah’s suspicions are no longer shared among the Iranian leadership, and thus many more reasons to be worried. One is that the president, the direct-descendant-of-Mohammad Ahmad Ahmadinejad, has some worrisome ideas, among them a commitment to wiping Israel, the Little Satan, off the face of the earth—he is a Holocaust denier and an ardent opponent of the Great Satan, namely America, though he hates it less than Israel. Considering some of the talk that has been lately emanating from the White House and the fact that American forces are on both flanks, Ahmadinejad may have cause to consider the U.S. “willing to achieve its expansionist goals through the use of brute force.” Given that Israeli leader Ehud Olmert has said that he has received a promise from President Bush that Iran would never be allowed to have nuclear weapons, the authors urge, there is pressing need to negotiate for dismantlement of Iran’s program. The mere existence of those weapons—which, the authors allow, is still conjecture—is no guarantee that the Iranians would use them. “On the surface,” they write in closing, “Iran’s leaders show no mercy and have no inhibitions, but they have occasionally proved to be responsible and even restrained.”
To do otherwise is to invite unsettling scenarios, each carefully considered. Those seeking either peace or regime change will find provocative arguments here.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7867-1887-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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