About this item
From Barnes & NobleI must admit that I read this book out of guilt: For many years, indeed decades, I have been following breaking Middle East news earnestly, but I still lacked a fuller perspective on Israel. In a sense, it was as if I had grown up with Israel without getting to know her better. Ari Shavit's beautifully written first-person history My Promised Land gave me a wider and deeper sense of the nation and the region. This is no narrow pedantic history: As Shavit describes it himself, it talks of "pioneers, orange groves, Masada, war, housing estates" and, of course, inevitably, bombs, including nuclear weapons. Ultimately, it is a story of people, both Jews and Palestinians, not government bureaucracies. It succeeds by burrowing beneath the ideologies that impede real dialogue.
About the Author
Yossi Klein Halevi is an author, thinker and commentator on Jewish and Israeli affairs. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, will be published in May 2018 by Harper Collins. His last book, Like Dreamers, took the top prize in the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards.A frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of leading newspapers and magazines, he is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative.His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, was published in 1995. In 2001, he published, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. Born in New York, Halevi moved to Israel in 1982 and lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah, a landscape designer. They have three children.
