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A Crack in the Earth (Paperback)
Loot Price: R418
Discovery Miles 4 180
You Save: R55
(12%)
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A Crack in the Earth (Paperback)
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List price R473
Loot Price R418
Discovery Miles 4 180
You Save R55 (12%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was
ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth.
This geological object has also been a part of human history ever
since early humans used it as a path in their journey out of
Africa. And for a quarter of a century it has been part of the
biography of Israeli writer Haim Watzman. In the autumn of 2004, as
his country was riven by a fierce debate over its borders, Watzman
took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the way he met
scientists who try to understand the rift through the evidence
lying on its surface--an archaeologist who reconstructs the fallen
altars of a long-forgotten people, a zoologist whose study of bird
societies has produced a theory of why organisms cooperate, and a
geologist who thinks that the valley will some day be an ocean. He
encountered people whose life and work on the shores of the Dead
Sea and Jordan River have led them to dream of paradise and to seem
to build Gardens of Eden on earth--a booster for a chemical
factory, the director of a tourist site, and an aging socialist
farmer who curates a museum of idols. And he discovered that the
geography's instability is mirrored in the volatility of the tales
that people tell about the Sea of Galilee. As an observant Jew who
has written extensively about science and scholarship, Watzman
tries to understand the valley in all its complexity--its physical
facts, its role in human history and his own life, and the myths it
has engendered. He realizes that human beings can never see the
rift in isolation. "It is the stories that men and women have told
to explain what they see and what they do as a result that create
the rift as we see it," he writes. "As hard as we try to comprehend
the landscape itself, it is humanity that we find. Watzman's poetic
evocation of the scientific and the human is a unique chronicle of
a quest for knowledge. Finalist, Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish
Literature, 2008.
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