At home in the house of my fathers

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Elmer Berger

"At the outset of the 1949 armistice negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, acting UN mediator Ralph Bunche expressed his hope that the talks would "chart the road to a peace for Palestine," an outcome apparently as elusive today as when he spoke those words more than forty years ago." "Perhaps the most significant aspect of this meticulously documented analysis of those negotiations is its relevance for today's headlines. Relating the proposals and counterproposals, the conspiracies and power plays to present-day Israeli and Middle East policies, Elmer Berger suggests that the basic negotiating strategies of the main players have persisted almost unchanged into the present, a "near rigidity" that has defeated all efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East's central conflict." "Berger is a controversial rabbi, an avowed anti-Zionist who proves himself capable of examining highly flammable issues and events with objectivity, insight, and rigorous scholarship. Drawing upon newly released material from official Israeli and U.S. archives, Berger manages to paint both the large picture and the telling detail - the frustrations of the conscientious and highly respected Bunche, the pathetically unprepared Arab negotiators, the well-informed Israeli diplomats, the intrigue of the Israel-Transjordan alliance." "The work will serve serious observers of the prolonged conflict over Palestine as a guide to applicable international law and to the attitudes and negotiating policies of the countries involved."--BOOK JACKET.

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Irving Brant

Possibly Franklin Roosevelt's best-known legacy in conservation was his executive order proclaiming the Jackson Hole National Monument in Wyomingthis in the middle of WW II. But he was directly involved in other projects: Olympia (Wash.) and Kings Canyon (Calif.) National Parks, the Carl Inn Sugar Pines (Calif.) as well as measures for wildlife protection. The late Brandt was himself a crusader, tireless lobbyist and major figure in conservation circles who also wrote speeches and plotted strategy for FDR and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in their fight to expand and create national parks. Brandt here portrays a president who was accessible to his staff and committed to conserving natural resources; the bitter wrangling between the Park and Forestry Services and the implacable opposition (and dirty tricks) by Western lumber and power interests. All this is narrated in excruciating detail, with correspondence, accounts of public and private meetings and official hearings, in an instructive study of conservation history, presidential style and public policy in the making.

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Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess

The title refers to a caption in the scrapbook of Kurt Franz, the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp. Underneath the heading "Those Were the Days," and reproduced here, are pictures of smiling officers at a site where some 700,000 people were exterminated in the gas chambers. To refute revisionist historians who negate the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and to disprove those Germans who said they were coerced into murdering Jews, the German authors--Klee is a journalist, Dressen a lawyer and Riess a historian--present the damning and harrowing diaries, letters, photo albums and official reports of Germans who willingly participated in the Final Solution. A member of a unit that killed 33,771 Jews in the Ukranian Babi Yar ravine boasts: "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there." Of the annihilation of thousands of Jews in White Russia, a commander says, "The action rid me of unneccessary mouths to feed." And wagging its tail for the camera is Franz's dog, which on numerous occasions was set upon Jews to bite off their genitals.

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Richard B. Morris, James Woodress

Uses excerpts from letters, diaries, novels, poetry, press reports, documents, and other contemporary sources to portray the events in Europe and the United States before, during, and after World War I.