Ben-Gurion: A Political Life

by David Landau, Shimon Peres Narrated by Michael Prichard

Overview

Shimon Peres was in his early twenties when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the "Old Man," as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions-a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community.



A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion's life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion's dream of a modern, democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Peres, president and former prime minister of Israel, provides an intriguing and intimate political biography of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israel’s first prime minister and his erstwhile mentor. Readers will enjoy Peres’s analysis of his relationship with Ben-Gurion and will find his humility appealing: “Why did Ben-Gurion take to me?” And his emotional admissions—that he had never “met a man with inner strength and determination” as Ben-Gurion and that like “Churchill, the other details of life shrink into insignificance alongside the decisions made at a crucial juncture in Israel’s history”—elevate this book above a standard biography. The author describes their long friendship with warmth, obvious affection, and respect, but readers might be surprised that the book’s brightest spots are when Peres discusses his own life, especially as reminiscences of Ben-Gurion frequently take the format of conversations between Peres and his co-writer, Landau, former editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which are embedded within the text and break up the flow of the narrative. (Oct.)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170691524
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/25/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

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