O JERUSALEM By Collins and LaPierre

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O JERUSALEM By Collins and LaPierre Jerusalem is the most hotly disputed site in the world. The authors of O Jerusalem, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, (who also wrote Is Paris Burning?) spent 5 years and conducted thousands of interviews to write this engrossing book on the conflict that has taken so many lives and profoundly affected so many people. The book begins with the withdrawal of the English military from Jerusalem under General Allenby as they finished their thirty-year mandate in the Holy Land (begun in 1917) and the Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish National Home. The Arabs were resentful at what they felt to be an effort to seize the land they believed theirs in the name of a crime they had not committed-the persecution of the Jews in the Christian West; driven to disaster by incompetent politicians; deeding the world the seeds of even more tragedy in their refugee camps. The history of this region and the countries surrounding it, and therefore involved in many of the conflicts, as well as the stories of such familiar people as Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion and others, are included to give an understanding of the politics surrounding the Six Day War. I was led to this book by my desire to understand the accounts I had read on the conflicts in the Middle East. For me, the most compelling aspect of the book is the style in which it was written. It is not just a narrative history, but is written as a fascinating story, based on interviews with public figures as well as many people who would never ordinarily be newsworthy. Because so much of the book is about day-to-day events (such as the recounting of how a mother was searching for a can of milk for her infant and was trapped in the gunfire of the Court of King David before making it safely back to her home) as well as the items of historical notice, a well fleshed-out picture is drawn of the magnitude of the fray. Descriptions of the refugee camps for Palestinians on the West Bank was unimaginable to me. I began to understand their desperate attempts to regain their religious heritage. At 600 pages, this book is not a quick read, but is an important and informative work. - Jan Irvine

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