A revealing companion to Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom’s Ariel Sharon: A Life (2006).
Measured life of the Israeli politician who, perhaps more than any other, made his nation into a military power, even as he worked for peace.
Throughout his long life, writes Bar-Zohar (Lionhearts, 1998, etc.), Shimon Peres has labored to make Israel secure. The octogenarian, with “just a normal lust for power,” has been a prominent presence in the nation’s politics since long before there was a nation. Bar-Zohar traces his early involvement in the kibbutz experiment, where, as a young socialist, he won a place in the postwar conferences leading to the establishment of the Jewish state. He was a civilian in the war following the end of the Mandate, however, which diminished his stature somewhat for years to come; independent of that, he was beginning to attract powerful enemies for many reasons, among them Golda Meir, who, it seems, could not bear even to be on the same airplane as Peres. (Said sometime Peres ally Teddy Kollek, “She doesn’t so much conduct a foreign policy as maintain a hate-list.”) In various roles, from minor official to defense minister, Peres worked diligently to establish alliances with the Western powers but was often rebuffed—particularly by the U.S. when it came to securing both conventional weaponry and nuclear capability, for which reason Peres turned to France and got what he needed. Military strength established, as a member of Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet and later as head of state, he “adopted moderate positions toward the Arab world and the Palestinians in particular,” a conciliation much at odds with stances he had taken previously. In 2006, at the height of the campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, he was busily promoting a plan for a “Corridor of Peace” along the valley of the Jordan River, where Palestinians, Jordanians and Israelis would live and work together.
A revealing companion to Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom’s Ariel Sharon: A Life (2006).Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6292-6
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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