Engaging, evenhanded account of a major Middle East conflict that still resonates today.
A clinical dissection of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, published in time for the 50th anniversary.
In a book he has been researching for 20 years, visiting battle sites and poring over archival documents, Kaufman clearly delineates the conflict, both the immediate aftermath and the long-term effects. He examines the military buildup in terms of Israel’s use of aerial power to destroy Egyptian and Syrian forces and how Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria’s Hafez el-Assad calculated their revenge. Despite intelligence reports, the Israeli military high command, led by Moshe Dayan, under the auspices of Golda Meir, dismissed alarms of imminent attack and was completely unprepared for a Syrian commando attack on Oct. 6. As Kaufman recounts in a play-by-play narrative, there were no tanks on the ground and few planes in the sky, and everything relied on quick improvisation. “Prior to the war,” writes the author, “the dictionaries of the world defined the Hebrew word mikhdal as a ‘failure to carry out something important.’ After the war, the word took on a new meaning, one that survives to this day: ‘a fiasco as monumental as the IDF’s failures in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War.’ ” Although each side claimed victory, Kaufman underscores that Israel had achieved its primary goal: “Egypt’s days of waging war against Israel were over.” Moreover, on March 18, 1974, the Arab oil embargo was lifted. This subject has been covered from a variety of historical and cultural perspectives, perhaps most memorably by Michael Oren in Six Days of War, but Kaufman’s contribution is a valuable addition to the literature. The book should prove useful for students of modern Middle East history as well as anyone interested in the mechanics of how the Arab-Israeli conflict has remained seemingly intractable for decades.
Engaging, evenhanded account of a major Middle East conflict that still resonates today.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781250281883
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
HISTORY | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | MILITARY | JEWISH | WORLD
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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