An Improbable Friendship
The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An Improbable Friendship is the dual biography of Israeli Ruth Dayan, now ninety-eight, who was Moshe Dayan’s wife for thirty-seven years, and Palestinian journalist Raymonda Tawil, Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law, now seventy-four. It reveals for the first time the two women’s surprising and secret forty-year friendship and delivers the story of their extraordinary and turbulent lives growing up in a war-torn country.
Based on personal interviews, diaries, and journals drawn from both women—Ruth lives today in Tel Aviv, Raymonda in Malta—author Anthony David delivers a fast-paced, fascinating narrative that is a beautiful story of reconciliation and hope in a climate of endless conflict. By experiencing their stories and following their budding relationship, which began after the Six-Day War in 1967, we learn the behind-the-scenes, undisclosed history of the Middle East’s most influential leaders from two prominent women on either side of the ongoing conflict.
An award-winning biographer and historian, Anthony David brings us the story of unexpected friendship while he discovers the true pasts of two outstanding women. Their story gives voice to Israelis and Palestinians caught in the Middle East conflict and holds a persistent faith in a future of peace.
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If it hadn't actually occurred, the friendship between Ruth Dayan (born 1917), the first wife of Israeli politician Moshe Dayan, and Raymonda Tawil (born 1940), the mother-in-law of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, would seem not merely improbable but impossible. This joint biography from David (coauthor of Once Upon a Country) traces the women's lives prior to 1970, the year of their meeting, and the collaboration that followed, one peppered with "standard quarrels" but forged by a mutual commitment to peace. In addition to noting the preeminence of politics in Dayan and Tawil's lives, David opens up their personal lives: their childhoods, their children, their travails (Dayan's divorce, Tawil's house arrest), and their enterprises (Dayan's Maskit, a craft and design collective employing immigrant women; Tawil's news agency). David, who wrote the book at the women's request, had access to Dayan's many cassette tapes and letters and to Tawil's diary, along with the many interviews he's conducted with them since 2009. At times, the biography has an "as told by" tone; in other sections, a novelistic tone creeps in, obscuring the difference between recreated conversation and recorded interviews. Some readers may find the admiring tone overly lacking in objectivity and critical distance, but David has succeeded in creating a vivid portrait of two very feisty women. 20 b&w photos.
