15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Strange Book - What a Disappointment!, October 6, 2005
This book was a huge disappointment to me. Like many other Israelis I grew up with the story of "Nili" (there was a wonderful children's book about the secret organization that we all were assigned to read at school in the seventies). When I heard that a new book had been published about Nili, one that promised to uncover mysteries about the organization, I ran to order it.
What a flop. This book reads like a combination of a not-funny "Toujours Provence" and a very confusing "A Thousand and One Nights."
The book is divided between two subjects. On the one hand, are the author's memories of his life in Zichron in the seventies. The memories are neither interesting nor illustrative. I've been to Zichron a number of times and yet I had a hard time garnering any kind of mental image of the place based on Halkin's book. It's just a collection of disjointed impressions with very little meat and no connecting threads.
More irritating are the significant sections of the book devoted to Nili. In the first place, there are a lot of people mentioned; and it's like a shtetl story - "the aunt of the sister of the brother-in-law" - practically impossible to wade through the people mentioned without a card index. A couple of genealogical tables would have been hugely helpful.
Second, the many anecdotes do not really connect to each other. Some are pertinent to the story and some aren't. I knew the history of the case pretty well before starting the book and I had the hardest time "connecting the dots." The author doesn't really resolve any important mysteries, in my opinion--he just confused the hapless reader. I cannot imagine being able to make any sense of the situation had I not already known so much about the case. Halkin never really takes on the main characters in the Nili story. They remain shadowed behind mountains of meaningless gossip. So many important questions could have been debated at length and are never really touched. I did not leave the book with a better understanding of the period or the characters involved.
The bottom line is that I am uncertain what the author really wanted to tell us in this book and I have the feeling that he is just as confused. It's not a finished book and not an edited book. It's also not a book you should buy.
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16 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A interesting story full of intrigue, June 26, 2005
An interesting book. And from the author...
Jun. 23, 2005 13:19
Essay: Why bother writing books? (JERUSALEM POST)
By HILLEL HALKIN
I've just come back from a book tour in America. It's called a "book tour," it turns out, because of all the airplane flights and hotel rooms that have to be booked for it.
Not that it didn't have its moments. In a Barnes & Noble's in Manhattan I read from a new book of mine for a turnout that filled every seat. A big part of my audience was rounded up for the occasion by my 91-year-old mother-in-law, who was proud of the poster with her son-in-law's picture in the window.
Before I had left at the evening's end this had already been removed, in confirmation of Andy Warhol's well-known prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for at least 15 minutes.
Elsewhere, the crowds were not as large. In Chicago, where I was scheduled at a university bookstore in the middle of final exam week, I appeared before an audience of 10, which included a cousin of my wife's, an old high-school friend, and the store's manager. Two people bought books - a reasonable percentage that almost covered the taxi fares.
And then there was the night I arrived at my New York hotel after a grueling flight from Los Angeles. At the front desk was a note from my publishing house. I had half-an-hour, it said, to get to a broadcasting studio where I had been slotted into a Jewish talk show. I rushed, sweaty and unshaven, to the address given me, where I found myself in a recording studio in a West Side apartment, in the room next to which two little children lay fast asleep on the floor. My host, the father of five such progeny, informed me that on a good night he had half-a-million listeners.
After we had chatted over the air about my book, he took telephone calls. The one caller to pick up the phone was someone anxious to know my opinion on disengagement.
Before I returned to Israel we held a post-mortem at the publisher's.
"You know," I said, "this was pointless. We wasted my time and your money. What did we do this for?"
My publicist looked at my editor. My editor looked at my publicist. I had the impression that no author had ever asked them such a question before.
"We didn't want to disappoint you," my editor said.
SO now I knew: Book tours are designed for authors who love flying from city to city to entertain small groups of people who have been unable to obtain theater tickets or bridge club invitations for the evening. It would be cruel to disappoint them.
What's for sure is that low-budget book tours don't sell books. But then, what does? Not good reviews. (I can vouch for that, because my books have had plenty of them.) Not the Internet either, which is useful for buying books that you've already heard about, but not for discovering ones you haven't.
And certainly not bookstores, 80% of which belong to big chains that wouldn't display a new book prominently, even if it were a lost volume of the Bible, without a sizable payment from its publisher. In the absence of such kickbacks, the most a book can hope for is to stand on a shelf with hundreds of others, its pinched spine facing outward like a condemned man before the firing squad.
What sells books is money. Lots of it. The more a publishing house spends on promotion, the more it stands to make in return. The problem is that there's an element of risk involved, and nowadays, when editors and their bosses are hired and fired by the managers of the conglomerates they work for as quickly as baseball managers by major-league owners, risks are not something that many of them want to take.
It works like this. Suppose Arnold Hopeful has written a novel and gotten a modest $25,000 advance for it. Suppose, too, that it's judged to be good but no blockbuster, and that Hopeful's publisher, Doomed Books, might sell 20,000 copies and earn $250,000 if it put $50,000 into promotion. But then again, it might not - and if it doesn't its directors know that at the end of the year an accountant from General Business or Amalgamated Investments is going to come around and demand to know why $50,000 were thrown away on a bummer.
This accountant, who may never have read a book in his life, will be less interested in Hopeful's literary talents than in the editor-in-chief of Doomed Books' scalp - which is why said editor will let Hopeful's novel fend for itself while relying on reviews and word-of-mouth to sell the 2,500 copies needed to recoup the initial investment. Better to break even and be asked no questions than to try to make money and jeopardize one's job.
ON THE other hand, suppose Doomed Books has gone and paid a $500,000 advance to the young superstar Nathan Flashpan, who has submitted a manuscript no better than Hopeful's. If our editor-in-chief wishes to avoid the ax, he may pour a million dollars into publicizing Flashpan's book in the hope of selling 100,000 copies and earning the advance back. In this sense, most publishing today is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a publisher feels a book must do well and spends accordingly, it probably will do well. If not, its prospects are slim.
The overwhelming majority of books published are the second kind. They face, if not the firing squad, Siberia. The same abundantly stocked stores such as Borders or Barnes & Noble's that seem so wonderfully inviting to book buyers are depressingly grim places for authors. Over 600 volumes are reputedly published in America every day, most of which never make it into the bookstores at all, but even those that do are up against hopeless odds. If they're not lucky enough to be displayed in the windows or on the front tables they have about as much chance of being picked out for adoption as a stray dog at the pound.
Why anyone continues to write books at all under such conditions is a good question. Presumably, it's just a habit we can't break. Indeed, it might be best at this point to declare a 100-year moratorium on all book writing so that readers can be given the opportunity to catch up with what's already on the shelves.
Meanwhile, I beg you all to buy my new book. It's .
The remainder of this sentence has been deleted by the editors of this newspaper, to whom Mr. Halkin did not pay a kickback.
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