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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
