October 31, 2011
New biography of David Ben-Gurion
At first glance, the thought of reading a biography of David Ben-Gurion written by Shimon Peres may seem like a waste of time. After all, Peres considers Ben-Gurion his hero and mentor so you can’t expect any sort of objective writing.
But, from what I can tell, the most interesting parts of Ben-Gurion: A Political Life seem to be those that give readers more insight into Peres rather than Ben-Gurion.
For this book, Peres teamed up with David Landau, former editor in chief at Ha’Aretz and current writer for The Economist, to tell the story of Ben-Gurion. At times, however, the biography moves to the side as Peres and Landau discuss various issues affecting the state of Israel.
In this way, it sounds like this book will end up as more fodder for a future biography of Peres as opposed to anything significant related to Ben-Gurion.
For those of you who may be interested in reading the autobiography of David Ben-Gurion, you can check out his 800-plus page tome, Israel: A Personal History.
Have any readers out there already read this new biography of Ben-Gurion? Let us know what you think in the comments below.