by Daniel Gordis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2014
For Gordis, Begin stands as an exemplary leader whose selflessness and deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel...
A life of Menachem Begin (1913–1992) considers his legacy.
With multiple biographies of Begin published in the last 10 years, Gordis (Senior Vice President/Shalem Coll.; The Promise of Israel, 2012, etc.) re-examines the controversial Israeli leader in order “to look at his life through the lens of the passion he still evokes” and to ask, “What was the ‘magic’ of his draw?” Born in Poland, Begin joined the Zionist Betar movement, founded by the charismatic Vladimir Jabotinsky. Serving in a leadership position in that organization, Begin honed his skills as a public speaker and committed himself to two basic ideas: the Jews must have their own state; independence required military strength. In 1939, Begin and his wife fled Poland for Palestine but got only as far as Vilna, Lithuania. There, Begin was arrested by the Soviets; although sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp, he was released after six months, joined the Free Polish Army and was sent as a soldier to Palestine. For the next 50 years, Begin was an outspoken, galvanizing and divisive force in Israeli politics. Gordis delineates the fierce controversies within the Zionist communities and focuses especially on the rivalry between Begin and David Ben-Gurion, a battle between Begin’s “romantic preoccupation” with Jewish victimization and Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic belief that Israel needed to move beyond the past. That essential difference resulted in opposing military, political and social strategies. In 1977, after losing eight consecutive elections, Begin finally achieved high office and became, as Gordis puts it, “the most Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers.” His first act was to give asylum to 66 Vietnamese refugees, and he insisted on welcoming Ethiopian Jews. Signing a hard-won peace treaty earned both Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat a Nobel Peace Prize.
For Gordis, Begin stands as an exemplary leader whose selflessness and deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel should inspire any who may question “the legitimacy of love for a specific people or devotion to its ancestral homeland.”Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4312-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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