cover image A SEASON IN BETHLEHEM: Unholy War in a Sacred Place

A SEASON IN BETHLEHEM: Unholy War in a Sacred Place

Joshua Hammerman, . . Free Press, $24 (286pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-4413-8

In this well-reported but overly dense "biography of place," the author, Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief, takes readers through the exotic terrain of this hotbed city and many of the characters who make it vital. Beginning with the start of the al-Aqsa intifada in the fall of 2000 and ending with the notorious siege on Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in spring 2002, Hammer opens his notebook to everyone from a Palestinian zealot to a Christian entrepreneur, from an Israeli army commander to the topography itself. The author has a knack for getting the rich comment or detail, and he mostly avoids the temptation to make snap judgments, carefully walking the line between sympathy and objectivity. But the book is done in by what is at once too much and too little information. It is hard to keep straight—much less be moved by—the avalanche of details about various revolutionaries and victims. At the same time, Hammer betrays his newsweekly roots by concentrating on the whats and wheres, but not the whys. The readability picks up in the last section, where the siege has the feel of a layered and well-written action sequence. But even here the constant cutting between vantage points makes the story confusing, while the author refrains from offering political or historical insight on one of the biggest flashpoints of the current conflict. It's like seeing Bethlehem through a very artful lens—the scope is wide and the prose is poetic, but it is just a series of images, not sufficiently engaged or thought-provoking to be compelling. (Sept. 8)