Book Reviews

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

It's this power of narrative that Robert Satloff hopes to unleash with Among the Righteous, his quest to find an Arab who saved a Jew during the Holocaust. (Yad Vashem, Israel's institution of Holocaust remembrance, lists not one Arab among its 21,310 documented cases of 'the righteous among the nations.') Satloff focuses on North Africa, where the Axis powers implemented familiar degradations, stripping Jews of their rights, homes, and property. Many were sent to labor camps and tortured, and 4,000 to 5,000 died.

Satloff, who is Jewish and an Arab policy expert (he directs the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank), details Arab participation in the persecution before unearthing a handful of moving tales of Arab heroism. Most captivating is the story of Khaled Abdelwahhab, a debonair Arab whose calculated carousing with German officers helped him rescue several Jewish families.

Satloff gathered his evidence from historical documents, witness accounts, the remains of labor camps in Morocco's desert, even a New York cocktail party. He calls the result 'part history, part travelogue, part memoir.' But given his objective-forging dialogue on the hotly contested territory of Jewish and Arab shared history-the subject would have benefited from a historian's cool, trained eye. Too often, Satloff asks the reader to jump to conclusions with him or veers off course, betraying a pro-Israel bias. Though Among the Righteous is valuable, it ultimately leaves the reader wishing for the 'mammoth task' that, Satloff acknowledges, 'awaits a
team of graduate students.'
-Hannah Lobel

HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT OWNING A CAR

by Chris Balish (Ten Speed Press)

CUTTING YOUR CAR USE

by Randall Ghent (New Society Publishers)

Not only is it possible to live well without owning a car, it's preferable. Sure, you'll need to make a few lifestyle adjustments, like trading in your keys for a bike or a bus pass, but your body and budget will thank you for it. To aid the transition, Chris Balish and Randall Ghent have written cargo pocket-sized books offering practical advice on coming out of the garage, and staying out. Both books are speckled with success stories about people who have kicked the
car habit, from a sixtysomething stockbroker in Missouri to a mother of two disabled teenagers in Florida. If that's not motivation enough to
get your butt into gear, consider the statistics. Balish reports that the average American spends $700 a month to own a set of wheels (and that was in 2004, before oil prices spiked), while Ghent calculates that the typical driver spends 825 hours a year driving, maintaining, and paying for a car in order to travel 12,000 miles. That makes for a mean speed of 14.5 miles an hour-or 'the pace of a brisk bicycle ride.' -Kristen Mueller

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print