'Clever, mischievous and humane, this is literary journalism in the proud tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Joseph Roth'Amos Elon, author of A Blood-Dimmed Tide.

A Holocaust survivor's tortured son, a Bedouin boy who kills his father with a stone, a Russian immigrant who crashes his car and vanishes into the desert, a veteran of the Yom Kippur war left with agonizing memories of his fallen comrades...In these piercingly honest portraits, Sarna describes how Israeli men and women struggle to hold on to their identity, their sanity and their hope in the face of brutal and desperate conditions. Sarna's modern-day parables of flesh and blood and soil expose just what it is like to live in the underbelly of the Zionist dream and the profound human toll exacted in the process of creating a nation.