Enlightening but sobering, particularly when one wonders where Meir’s utopian ideals went to.
Spirited biography of the Zionist activist and pioneering Israeli leader.
To readers of a certain age, Golda—“the sassy nicotine-stained grandmother who wore baggy suits and orthopedic shoes, spoke with an accent in every language but Yiddish, and led one of the smallest countries in the world”—needs no surname. Yet, particularly in the post-Intifada Middle East, Golda Meir’s contributions to Israeli history have come to be overshadowed. Journalist and longtime Middle East hand Burkett (So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places, 2004, etc.) brings those contributions to the fore, even as the author considers that the ideals for which the Moldova-born, Milwaukee-educated Meir fought are not the ones that prevailed in Israel, “that despite her hectoring, her egalitarian utopia of idealist pioneers would turn into a dog-eat-dog capitalist society rife with consumerism and greed.” Meir, of course, had other things to worry about. Having survived the surprisingly uncollegial world of state politics and even engineered a modest coup to supplant David Ben-Gurion (who famously called her the only man in his cabinet), Meir spent much of her tenure as Israeli’s prime minister trying to avoid falling into various traps Henry Kissinger laid for her in the service of Nixonian realpolitik. Burkett is at her best in reconstructing these tense moments, explaining, quite reasonably, that “there was little that Golda feared more than a peace imposed by outside powers,” having had plenty of experience with those outside powers during the years of war and protectorate. Meir had plenty of problems at home as well, navigating the rightist shoals of Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and company. Burkett capably explains all the political complexities while suggesting that the legendarily tough Meir would have gladly folded back Israel’s post–Six-Day War borders had any of the Arab powers agreed to talk about it at the time—a process that is ongoing more than 40 years later.
Enlightening but sobering, particularly when one wonders where Meir’s utopian ideals went to.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-078665-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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