An Israeli version of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (2004), both hard-nosed and thoughtful—and most illuminating.
A nuanced view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by a former foot soldier in the long war.
Now an editor, journalist and translator, Watzman grew up in suburban Washington, acquiring a strong interest in Jewish identity as a bookish adolescent “so physically inept that any team forced to take him in gym class got two extra players as compensation.” Stunned by the UN resolution of 1975 equating Zionism and racism, he determined to learn more about the Palestinian conflict, and he found Israel wanting—but, he adds, did not join other left-leaning intellectuals in subjecting Israel to higher standards of moral behavior than other nations and then concluding, “when it fails the test . . . that the Jewish state ought not exist at all.” Enlisting in the Israeli army, Watzman took his place in Company C, an infantry unit descended from the storied Jerusalem Brigade; his narrative recounts two decades’ service as a frontline soldier and reservist, some of it under harrowing circumstances that surely toughened him, though he gamely admits that he still can’t throw a grenade far. His fellow soldiers, he notes, were religious or nonreligious in quite various degrees; because he was observant, some of his comrades took him as ultranationalist, though he emerges from the trials by fire as ever more willing to seek a peaceful solution, ever more tired of bloodshed. Though many in Company C opposed the Oslo peace process, he urged a different view: “If we on the left could demonstrate that the Palestinians were sincere and reliable partners in peace, we could neutralize some of the opposition to accommodation.” Even though committed to looking for peaceful solutions, Watzman argues the need for his fellow citizen-soldiers to do their duty to country and God, “if for no other reason than it gives you the right to argue with Him and with those who claim to know exactly what He wants.”
An Israeli version of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (2004), both hard-nosed and thoughtful—and most illuminating.Pub Date: June 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-22633-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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