I first saw Mr. Viorst on PBS an an expert on Middle East affairs and was impressed by his keen insights. Considering that he is a Jewish writer living in the United States, he has established a highly independent and well-founded perspective on the state of Israel and its relationships with both the Arab world and the United States. After reading all of Henry Kissinger's writings on the Arab-Israel struggle, I found this book a wonderful counterpoint to the cold war outlook on Mideast politics taken by so many American administrations. I would compare it to David Shipler's perspective in his book on Arab and Jew; Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. Perhaps with the end of the cold war, Mr. Viorst's perspective on the Arab-Israeli struggle will begin to find more resonance in the capitols of the western world. I would highly recommend this book to any serious student of Mid-East politics and history. In a time when we are fighting a battle against Osama bin Laden, Mr. Viorst illuminates the reasons why American policy in the Middle East may have, purposefully or inadvertently, helped to inflame so many Arabs while bringing no lasting peace to the region.

He also does an excellent job, through the political history of Israel since its inception, sorting out the movements, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Zionist and Revisionist, etc. that have pushed and pulled Israel in conflicting directions over the past 50 years. For that alone, this book should be compulsory reading for any student of Israeli political history. While it was written in the late 1980's, it still shines a light on the events which have since transpired.

This is an extremely thoughtful book by a Jewish writer who has obviously taken great pains to get to know the various strains of Islam and to approach his subject without the blinders of nationality or religion. He does an excellent job of sorting out the historical and cultural movements across the Islamic world. Although it was written before the events of September 11, 2001, it is prescient in its enumeration of the movements and events which gave rise to those tragedies. For westerners used to secular governments, freedom of religion and the strict separation of church and state, it provides a chilling reflection on a world where religion and religious thinking play a much more central role in the life of nations.

It does get disjointed in places and requires great concentration on the part of the reader. However, that does not detract from its importance for any student of the modern Islamic world.

I have traveled extensively through Turkey, Egypt and Israel and have read much on the Islamic world and the Middle East and Central Asia--from left-leaning writers like Said and Aburish to more Western-oriented analysts like Fouad Ajami and Judith Miller. No one has done a better job than Viorst of explaining Islam to Western readers. He catches the nuances of Islam's complexity and diversity, and looks unflinchingly at the qualities in Islam that have kept so much of the Arab and Islamic world mired in poverty and backwardness. But he is ultimately more hopeful than Adjami and Aburish and focuses with a wide enough lens to see the threads in Islamic thought that could lead its adherents out of their current morass. It is popular in many quarters to blame the problems of the Middle East on colonialism and American and Western hegemony. This is clearly an oversimplification and counter-productive for those trying honestly to figure out a solution. Viorst's analysis gets to the root of the internal problems that have made the Arab world's response to colonialism so very different and so much more self-destructive than Asia's. This is a "must read".

Milton Viorst is the author of a previous book on the Middle East, the well received "Sand Castles". With the "Shadow of the Prophet", Viorst attempts to show the problems associated with politics and one of the world's great religions, Islam. Viorst shows how Islam has contributed to the political stagnation of Middle Eastern countries as well as exposes some of the myths associated with fundamentalist Islamic movements. In synthesis, the book presents an accurate and balanced view of the history and future perspectives of Islam. Maybe the book's only flaw is that it deals only with the Middle East (and Muslims living in France) and does not include other Islamic movements in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. A must buy for anyone interested in this region of the world.

This was one of several required books for an American Studies class I had in college. I learned so much from this book. Each chapter tackled different issues/themes that were so defining for that era.

The book was a very easy to read book, and fun to read. There was a lot of information in the book that was very interesting. Milton Viorst the author, did a great job depicting what went on in this era without over doing it. He got the main information out, and explained why someone meets someone. Like with Rubin and Hoffman. Viorst explained easily that Rubin met Hoffman because Rubin was out trying to find people who didn't like the militant views. It was really interesting on how he didn't just do the big stars of the sixties but the people that weren't as huge. Many people don't know that Rudolph and Rustin were the real ones behind the March on Washington. Many people think it was all Martin Luther King's idea. I thought that he picked people and events that were interesting, like Rubin, the riots of Watts, Freedom Riders. It was also really good to learn that even though blacks at the time were oppressed, they had a lot of power, and MLK was the one who controlled and used it wisely. Like the candidates Nixon and Kennedy. No one off the street knows that the black population really decided who one the elections. The only thing that was not good about the book was that Viorst stopped on one person and went on to the other. Many readers may be wanting to read about that person more but then the book goes on to a different topic. This happened on page 432, where it is talking about the assaults of Chicago, and then goes to MLK. The only other thing was Viorst didn't have to go into the childhood of the people he talked about, Viorst draws you in on what happening when someone is thirty then goes this person was born in Alabama in a new paragraph.

This was not the book I expected from the cover and the reviews. I thought it would be a history of intra-Jewish discord; instead, the first 2/3 of the book is just a general history of Judaism (useful for the beginner, but no more so than many other books), and the rest is a discussion of Rabin's assassination and the ideological disputes within Israel that led to it.

I was disappointed in some other ways:

1. The book's discussion of Israeli politics is out of date. It ends with Rabin's assassination in 1995. But at the time I am writing this (early 2003) the Oslo peace process looks to many former doves like a sham, Israel seems more far more united (behind Ariel Sharon) than it has been in decades, and the dispute between Rabin and his enemies is about as relevant to modern events as the 18th-century disputes between Hasidim and their enemies.

2. The book is sometimes a bit sloppy; the most common distortion seems to be Viorst's belief that most Orthodox Jews (or most ultra-Orthodox, or most Hasidim) share the views of a few ideologues. For example, he cites Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum's attacks on Zionism, and asserts that "To this day, Hasidim conventionally maintain that Israel is a heresy which exposes Jews to a vengeful God." (p. 173). This view would be news to Chabad Hasidim, who conventionally are so pro-Israel they make Milton Viorst look like Joel Teitelbaum.

To begin with, this is a fine book. It is the first history of the Jewish people in many years, that starts and ends on the topic of Jewish unity and internal divisiveness. Viorst looks at how internal Jewish religious politcs have played out all through Jewish history, going all the way back to the patriarchs, through Exodus to the Temple Destructions. From then on he analyzes the Talmudic age and it's particular issues, through the medival period, down to the divisive internal politics of Israel and the Middle East conflicts in our day.

However, this is not to say this book is a neutral view. The author makes clear his dovish sympathies by mid-way through the text, and as a Conservative Jew, gives very short shrift to the many serious and valid points, at least for them, that Orthodox intellectuals and politicians raise in Israel and abroad. In addition, he presents the history of Jewish internal disagreement with virtually no reference to the spiritual issues involved, which for the Orthodox and this non-orthodox writer, are at the heart of the matter.

Lastly, as many Jewish journalists do, he tends to exaggerate the extent of the internal disagreements within the Jewish world, perhaps to increase the level of apparent urgency in his work. In Israel for example, many members of Knesset will shout insults at each other from the podium and then go sit down to lunch together in the Knesset Cafeteria, yet the media only captures the first part of the performance.

Spiritually though, the level of unity between Jews has been a crucial determinant of Jewish national fortune throughout history, for when Jews start hating each historically, is when external persecution begins to arise. This was the case before the Temple Destructions, and even more so before the Shoah, when Stalinist Jews in Russia, killed hundreds of thousands of their own, and millions of gentiles to appease Stalin.

This aspect, called Sinat Hinam or baseless hatred, is mentioned in Viorst's book, but is given nowehere near the prominence it deserves. In fact, Viorst's text looks at Jewish politics historically and currently, exclusively in that light, and that is it's signal if not only weakness. In my own book, "Jewish History and Divine Providence: Theodicy and the Oddyssey" I look at Jewish history from the standpoint of Divine Providence or Karma, and show how the rise and fall of Jewish fortunes historically, has in fact been effected by Jewish unity and piety.

This was especially the case before and after the Shoah, and with the State of Israel, for reasons I detail in the book, available here on Amazon. For those who want to know about the politics of Jewish disunity, Viorst's work is a good place to start. However, if the reader desires to get the complete spiritual picture, they should read "Jewish History and Divine Providence" in conjunction with it.

Having just returned from another working visit to Israel, I thoroughly appreciated this book and think I understand the state better after reading the book. Although I am not Jewish, I consider Israel a basically positive country at the forefront of liberal civilization's battle with terror and French-style collaborationism. This work discussed one of Israel's less appealing sides -- the intolerance and occasional fanaticism that Jews have often displayed toward other Jews. If peace ever arrives in the region, these internal forces may cripple Israel even more than they do today.

In my opinion, the author begins with the best introductory narration of Jewish post-Exile history I have ever read. If you have been confused by the amazingly abstruse twists and turns of Judaism's schools of thought, you might do well to read the first part of the book. The author explains how Judaism's diversity has contributed to its strength, and how the Exile contributed to Jewish survival rather than guaranteeing its extinction.

Then the author explores a most unpleasant side of modern Israeli domestic politics. He explores the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as a case study of the divisive forces within modern Israel. Rabin did as much to advance the security of Israel as anyone has ever done, but he was eventually betrayed and effectively murdered by intolerant fanaticism and "political extremism dressed up as religion." Viorst's description of Rabin's assassin was most uncomfortable, not because the assassin was evil, but because he was such a sane, unemotional, ordinary man. I was reminded of Hannah Arendt's and Thomas Merton's description of Adolf Eichmann, who was so frightening because he was so sane and "normal."

Viorst, a reporter who has traveled in recent years to the Middle East for The New Yorker, can snag the startling quotation (a Gazan told him "The Arabs say they're our friends, and treat us worse than the Israelis do") and he can write incisively (President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria is a man for whom "an air of enigma is an instrument of state"). But the odd insight does not save a book chock-full of pretension, factual mistakes, cultural incomprehension, and political bias. The pretension starts with the subtitle: somehow, Viorst flatters himself into believing that a few trips to the Middle East and some interviews with Middle Eastern politicians gives him a base for interpreting the Arab experience with modernity. Some of his errors make one doubt that Viorst had his eyes open while traveling. How could a repeat visitor to Damascus assert that President Asad "shunned the creation of a personality cult"? In fact, Asad's representation is ubiquitous within Syria. Sandcastles contains illogical passages. We learn on one page that Asad has faced no challenge to his rule since 1970; seven pages later, Viorst reports on the carnage at Hama in 1982 that resulted from precisely such a challenge. Though he treads light on politics, Viorst betrays an all-too-familiar outlook throughout his account: stick it to America's allies (in this case, Turkey, Kuwait, and Israel), portray its opponents favorably. For example, his chapter on Turkey (not usually known as an Arab country, but included here anyway) bristles with antipathy. He describes Istanbul (in an ungrammatical flourish) as a "melancholy city" and exploits the bad weather during his visit as a metaphor for Turkey's unattractiveness.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1994