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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
