I'm calling the police - Irvin D. Yalom

This is a very short autobiographical story about a Jewish friend of the author who managed to escape the Nazis and flee from Budapest to the USA when he was only 17 years old, by himself, with basically no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the English language. And who then went on to become a top-skilled, world-famous heart surgeon.

Jerusalem: the biography - Simon Sebag Montefiore

The history of the holy and mystical city par excellence from King’s David reign to the intifadas.
This is a marvelous work by a famous historian who manages to tell the history of the city basing it on written, oral and archeological sources, stating merits and faults of all the people, civilizations and religions that had a part in it.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a very short introduction - Martin Bunton

I found this short essay on the shelves of a very nice second hand book shop in Pattaya, of all places! It’s a very useful overview on a conflict whose causes are very old and intricate, academic style but easy to read, free of all the irritating and confusing biased nuances typical of those media outlets that tend to support one side, for genuine or dubious reasons. It starts telling us about the Ottoman Empire land reform that lead to the centralization of most of the agriculturally interesting areas in the hands of some Muslim prominent families.

Hitler - Johann Chapoutot, Christian Ingrao

We all somehow have the impression that we know a lot about Adolf Hitler as a historical figure. Even those who haven’t read any books about Nazism or WWII have surely watched at least a documentary or a couple of war movies on those topics.
Yet, it turns out that most of the common ideas about this famous character are at the very least overestimated, at times even outright wrong. His fame as an evil genius is usually blown out of proportion (as far as the “genius” part of the expression is concerned), and his assumed fame as a great military tactician is as far from reality as it can possibly be.

O Jerusalem - Dominique Lapierre & Larry Collins, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas, L. Friedman

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

16th item on the list.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, besides defining the personal histories of the millions of people directly involved in it, has had a strong impact on many aspects of the life of pretty much anyone living anywhere for the past 70 years.