May 4, 2008
Two reviews of Benny Morris' new book
On the eve of Israel's 60th anniversary, Benny Morris' new book, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War,” is receiving a lot of attention.
First, writing in the Sunday New York Times Books Section, David Margolick, a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine, called the book evenhanded and exhaustive. If anything, Margolick says Morris might have spared readers some of the more tedious details:
Deep inside Morris’s book is an authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile event. He has reconstructed that event with scrupulous exactitude. But despite its prodigious research and keen analysis, “1948” can be exasperatingly tedious. The battlefield accounts, dense with obscure place names and weapons inventories, are so unrelenting, and unrelentingly dry, that you are grateful for the full-page maps (which themselves are hard to follow). The narrative cries out for air and anecdote and color.
Second, the book received a review this week in The New Yorker. Editor David Remnick didn't say a lot about the new book but he gives a broad overview of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he delves into Benny Morris' career.
Here's more:
In the late eighties, Israel encountered its first revisionist historians, a group of rigorous young scholars intent on seeing clearly the founding and development of the state, come what may. At the head of that small and diverse movement was Benny Morris, a Sabra and a Cambridge-educated leftist, who, like Israel itself, was born in 1948. His latest book on that pivotal year of war and transformation, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale; $32.50), is a commanding, superbly documented, and fair-minded study of the events that, in the wake of the Holocaust, gave a sovereign home to one people and dispossessed another. Remarkably, the book makes every attempt at depth and balance, even though its author has professed a “cosmic pessimism” about the current situation in the Middle East and has denounced the Palestinian leadership in the harshest terms imaginable.
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