A terrific chronicle of a unique world leader.
An evenhanded new biography of one the larger-than-life Israeli leader.
During her entire 50-year public career, Golda Meir (1898-1978) was dedicated to the cause of Zionism and creation of the state of Israel, from joining the socialist Workers of Zion movement in high school in Milwaukee in 1915, to becoming the fourth prime minister of Israel in 1969. In this suitably admiring but hardly gushing chronicle, versatile writer and journalist Klagsbrun (The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day, 2012, etc.) guides readers through her own journey of understanding this enormously important, often contradictory, crafty, and frequently opaque personage in Israel's history. The project is the result of a long-running research between America and Israel, including the use of newly declassified files. Meir—whom Klagsbrun refers to as “Golda” throughout because that is the way the premier wanted to be addressed, only adopting the Hebraized version of her married name, Meyerson, because her mentor David Ben-Gurion strongly suggested it in the late 1950s—was hugely popular, even adored, as an effective rainmaker for Israel in 1940s and ’50s America, the land of her youth; yet later in Israel, it was a different story. Meir never regained the popularity she enjoyed when first becoming premier in Israel in 1969. In a time of a series of debilitating terrorist attacks and an alarming (for her) unraveling of the social fabric, including, ironically, the thrust of feminism, she and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were blamed for being blindsided by the attacks of Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and she resigned over the painful subsequent protests. As the author shows in her well-rounded portrait, Meir was Ben-Gurion’s “only man in the Israeli cabinet," a ferocious chain-smoking socialist leader without a high-level education but whose plainspoken speeches brought audiences to tears—and action.
A terrific chronicle of a unique world leader.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4237-9
Page Count: 856
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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