Much superior to Ronald Florence’s Lawrence and Aaronsohn (2007). Goldstone honors both Aaronsohns, closing with notes on...
Whatever happened to Aaron Aaronsohn, scientist, ecumenical patriot and spy? Felix Frankfurter muttered that a “bloodstained hand” had silenced him, as it had his spy sister. And thus opens journalist/historian Goldstone’s spry scholarly detective story.
Aaronsohn, an émigré to Palestine, recognized that only with the help of the native Arabs would the Jewish people be able to make a homeland. He busied himself working on agriculture improvement projects and puzzling out the mysteries of the region’s hidden waters, all the while tucking away all sorts of useful information into his capacious mind. When World War I broke out, he began to deliver that information to the British, eager to help free Palestine from its Ottoman masters; the information he provided was of as much material use as were T. E. Lawrence’s raids in the eastern desert, which may have brought the two into the same orbit: Goldstone speculates, intriguingly, that the “S. A.” to whom Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom was Aaronsohn’s sister Sarah. (As for Lawrence of Arabia’s version of history, Goldstone notes that Robert Graves insisted that Lawrence was straight.) Though their perils, too, “seemed made for the big screen,” the Aaronsohns operated with quiet efficiency throughout the war; as Goldstone writes, though courageous, Aaron “relied on his scientific knowledge as the basis for his intelligence” and used water as a weapon in the campaign to take Damascus, all the while maneuvering carefully to further the emergence of a Zionist state. Sarah was caught and tortured to death “without having revealed a thing to the Turks” while her brother was in London awaiting the Balfour Declaration; the victim of a mysterious airplane crash over the English Channel, he would soon disappear not just from the world, but from history.
Much superior to Ronald Florence’s Lawrence and Aaronsohn (2007). Goldstone honors both Aaronsohns, closing with notes on how Aaron’s plans for equitable water rights in Palestine might have led to peace today.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101169-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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