Flamboyant Harvard Law professor and appellate advocate Dershowitz (The Best Defense, Reversal of Fortune, etc.) writes engagingly and bluntly of the unique problems and challenges of being Jewish in general, and being Jewish in America in particular. With all the persuasiveness and ``chutzpah'' for which he has become renowned in his criminal-defense work, Dershowitz assails the view (which he contends is current among both Jews and gentiles of his generation) that American Jews are merely ``guests'' in a predominantly Christian America, and that American Jews must defer to views and sensibilities of non-Jewish citizens. He also rejects the notion that American Jews are ``second-class Jews'' simply because they live in the heterodox US and have not made aliyah (i.e., migrated to Israel). American Jews, he says, ``need not compromise either...Americanism or...Jewishness.'' Using as starting points personal anecdotes of his own childhood in the Orthodox community of Brooklyn, his education at Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, his brief period of law-firm practice, his Supreme Court clerkship, his academic career, and his involvement with such cases as the Jonathan Pollard spy case and a libel case against the anti- Semitic Polish Cardinal Glemp, Dershowitz explores issues of anti-Semitism, discrimination against Jews, and loyalty to Israel. Proudly, he urges American Jews to assert their own self- interest without guilt or fear. Occasionally, he exhibits an unfortunate tendency to vilify those who disagree with him (Noam Chomsky, Norman Podhoretz, Patrick Buchanan), but his narrative is absorbing, his discussions lively, and his arguments often convincing. An energetic and stimulating exposition of the primary political and cultural issues confronting Jewish Americans.
Pub Date: May 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-18137-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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