Well-documented but slow-moving second volume in Reinharz's monumental three-volume biography of Israel's first president (Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader, 1985). Here, Reinharz (Modern Jewish History/Brandeis Univ.) recounts the years and negotiations that led to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the 1922 ratification of the British Mandate for Palestine—initial steps in the creation of Israel. Reinharz covers Weizmann's career from the beginning of WW I- -when the Zionist, an ÇmigrÇ Russian Jew then residing in Great Britain, gained considerable political influence by using his scientific expertise to invent a cheap method of making acetone for explosives—through the victorious Balfour Declaration, difficult times in settling Palestine, and the ensuing British Mandate. The author seemingly has sought out every letter, diary entry, memorandum, newspaper clipping, and speech that Weizmann wrote, received, or was mentioned in—or that pertained to a Jewish homeland—during those years. Reinharz also has assembled a vivid and historical gallery comprised of the many figures of the Zionist movement, the British government, and others who dealt with Weizmann—including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Baron James de Rothschild and his wife Dorothy, and American jurist Louis Brandeis. But in his earlier pages, the author sheds little light on Weizmann's personality, other than emphasizing his perseverance; it's only in later, livelier passages describing Weizmann's travels to Israel in 1918 that the statesman's leadership, energy, eloquence, diplomacy, and affection for his wife and children become apparent. Reinharz's writing again becomes pedestrian, though, when he retells the events leading up to Weizmann's triumph in the British Mandate. Not so much compelling as admirably—perhaps definitively- -detailed. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-507215-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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