A leading Israeli diplomat’s insider view of the intricate negotiations between his country and the Palestinians from May 1993, four months before the conclusion of the Oslo agreement, through May 1996 and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Savir, former Israeli consul-general in New York, became director general of his country’s Foreign Ministry under the late Yitzhak Rabin. When it became apparent that the secret Oslo talks begun in early 1993 had a real potential for a diplomatic breakthrough, he was named head of the Jewish state’s negotiations with the PLO, and then the Palestinian Authority, during the three-year period he chronicles. Norwegian mediators half-jokingly, half-seriously introduced his Palestinian counterpart, Abu Ala, to Savir as “your enemy number one.” The two often conveyed sharply conflicting views and instructions from their superiors, yet not only learned how to work together but developed a deep respect, even fondness, for each other. Savir is most revealing in relating how fraught with basic national yearnings and symbolism even the most seemingly technical issues became. The Israelis were desperate for security and an end to terror, the Palestinians equally insistent on not being condescended to or humiliated by the Israelis, and upon a recognition of the trappings of a national identity. Savir also writes with an admirable capacity to criticize Israeli leaders in a thoughtful and restrained way. For example, concerning Israel’s closure of the Gaza and West Bank borders and its concomitant focus on Arafat’s inadequate efforts to combat Palestinian terrorists, he acknowledges that “we tended to be so focused on the Palestinian leadership that we often failed to see Palestinian society as a community of needs and aspirations that its leaders must serve and reflect.” Passages like this will make Savir open to charges of not being a hard-headed enough diplomat and historian; others will rightfully praise him for possessing the skilled negotiator’s necessary qualities of empathy, vision, and an ability to compromise.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42296-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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