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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
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