Peacemakers are rare in the Middle East today, and this well-written biography is thus particularly timely.
An admiring, if critical, life of the Israeli warrior/politician.
When Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006, he “cast Israel’s future in a nebulous light.” So write Hefez and Bloom, editors of the Israeli weekly newspaper Yedioth Tikshoret, in this study of a man widely reviled and widely honored both at home and abroad. The point is well taken, for Sharon had just engineered what seemed an impossibility: the removal of unauthorized Israeli enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank after having been “the greatest proponent of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories.” The equivocation was characteristic of Sharon, the authors assert; the man—born Arik Scheinerman and given his Hebrew nom de guerre by David Ben-Gurion—himself had long opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and then endorsed it, had favored massive retaliation against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War but rejected it in the second, had long held out against the withdrawal from the West Bank and then ordered that very thing. What Sharon’s legacy will be is anyone’s guess, but he will likely be remembered for the creation of the right-wing Likud Party, which has dominated Israeli politics for many years. Hefez and Bloom’s account of the strange-bedfellow rivalries across and within party lines is fascinating: the long rivalries among Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Ehud Olmert and Sharon over the years make it seem a miracle that any unified act has ever come out of the Knesset. Sharon’s late move to the center, the authors suggest, was heartfelt and not the result of political calculation; even though its coincidence with Colin Powell’s lobbying for moderation vis-à-vis the Palestinians after 9/11 is interesting, the shift may owe most to Sharon’s desire “to change his entry in the annals of history from warmonger to peacemaker.”
Peacemakers are rare in the Middle East today, and this well-written biography is thus particularly timely.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6587-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
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