Sixteen thoughtful, sometimes penetrating essays and long reviews, most of which originally appeared during the past decade in the New York Review of Books, about the outstanding political personalities and societal issues of contemporary Israeli life. Margalit (Philosophy/Hebrew Univ.; The Decent Society, 1996, etc.), a political columnist, notes “the tendency to describe and think about Israel in allegories” and the fact that “much of the criticism of Israel, both internal and external, is directed at its pretensions rather than its reality.” By contrast, he focuses on the specific character and historical records of such political leaders as Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, the late Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres, as well as on the psychological, ideological, and socio-economic repercussions of such phenomena as the large-scale immigration to Israel from the former USSR. His best essays, “The Rise of the Ultra-Orthodox,” “The Use of the Holocaust in Israel,” and “The Kitsch of Israel,” deal with the mythos of the Jewish state. Usually, Margalit writes as an observer, though hardly a dispassionate one; his “dovish” sentiments are evident. His fluid prose also manifests a keen awareness of the many paradoxical and ironical aspects of Israeli life, as when the author observes that right-wing immigrants —vacillate between a sense of megalomania about Israeli might, on the one hand, and on the other, feelings of extreme self-pity and powerlessness.” His writing reveals that with the country’s many internal tensions and countervailing trends, not to mention its balkanized party system, nothing is self-evident or simple about current Israeli politics. Readers who want a souvenir album about Israel at 50 should pass on this one. But others will enjoy the resounding uneasiness of Margalit’s pieces.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-24941-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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