Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has recently written a new book about Israel and Palestine, but this one’s about the future, not the past. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg reviews One State, Two States

• The Chateau ipod

and summarizes:

Morris…argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state complrised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.

Morris is a fascinating case: he’s a historian of conflict that hasn’t ended, and one he’s lived through his entire life. He’s considered the first of Israel’s “new historians,” who emerged in the late 1980’s in the midst of the first intifada to challenge the myths of Israel’s founding. But failure of the peace process and the second intifada that followed in 2000 led Morris to a radical about face – to a morbid view of the future of his country and a black view of its Palestinian counterparts.

You can actually see the change in the last chapter he tacked onto Righteous Victims when it came out in paperback in 2001, while the second intifada raged. Righteous Victims is still the best overall history of the conflict, but that last chapter should be read as the work of a different man. Editorializing also creeps into 1948, his excellent and mostly straightforward history of the first Arab-Israeli war, which I reviewed last year. Now he writes without the constraints of a historical perspective, and Goldberg rightly dismantles Morris’ new book and his “almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state.”

Israel has just elected the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and he’s appointed the militant Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister. The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza while the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority dithers in the West Bank. Morris might be too close to the conflict to judge soundly, but his cynicism is understandable.

-Greg Waldmann

If only more people read book reviews! It’s not just self-interest talking here; if everyone read the New York Review of Books, or say, Open Letters Monthly, they might avoid the chaff and spend their valuable time on something…valuable. Suppose you wanted to read about the most successful people in the world. What are the factors that make them so? Millions who want an answer to this question turn to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to think that scientists are wasting their time with things like sample size and error control. As Sue M. Halpern of the NYRB Sicko dvdrip puts it

any statistician will tell you, you can’t learn anything about populations from an n of 1. It’s not a sample, it’s an amusement.

OLM’s Peter A. Coclanis has a middle initial too, and he comes to a similar conclusion:

Auden was on to something with his admonition in “Under Which Lyre” that “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science,” but he never had to deal with Malcolm Gladwell. And even Auden, I think, would have appreciated the general concept of representativeness and understood that data is not the plural of anecdote.

Now, let’s say you want to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you wanted an overall history, and you happened to be asking, my vote would be for Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims. But maybe you want something more specific. It just so happens that Professor Morris has a more recent book about the first Arab-Israeli war, called, appropriately enough, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Gershom Gorenberg reviews it in the NYRB Evan Almighty move :

The conflagration of 1948 was the war that began all Arab–Israeli wars. This will not be the last history of it, and not only because new papers will come to light, perhaps from still-sealed Arab archives. If the story is retold after peace—by Benny Morris or someone else—the facts and the motives will necessarily look different. It might be easier to see both Jews and Arabs with greater sympathy, as human beings caught in a storm. In the meantime, Morris has Karas: The Prophecy full movie indeed served the purpose of reconciliation, by making a fuller picture of what happened in 1948 part of Israeli memory. For that he deserves gratitude.

I wrote much the same thing last year:

Eden Log film Benny Morris’ greatest success in this book is in challenging the conventional mythology of both sides and laying out a mostly even-handed account of the first Arab-Israeli war, but a definitive history of Israel’s founding has still not been written. Such a history would include documents that are presumably still locked up somewhere in the capitals of Israel’s neighbors. That history’s narrative would give equal attention to both sides of the story. But that history hasn’t been written yet because the conflict is still ongoing, and the feelings are still are too intense. In the meantime, Morris’ books, including this one, are among the best we have.

• The Alamo buy Fat Albert full

Jumanji trailer

Most people who read don’t read book reviews, or they get them from (shudder) the Amazon.com comments field. They shouldn’t! I don’t mean to say that we critics are infallible, but we are here to help. We read books and we write about them. In fact, we don’t do much else with our time. So take advantage! Or, to take a cue from Mr. Gladwell, NYRB + OLM = good book recommendation.

-Greg Waldmann Hobgoblins 2