אברהם ב. יהושע

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape--she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful--he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. -- From publisher description.

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Haifa University, is equally determined to understand the causes of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s and the mystery of his son's divorce. His is a double search for truth, each involving a different bride - Samaher, his own research assistant, an ambitious Arab newlywed from a village in the Galilee, and Galya, who deserted his son in Jerusalem with no explanation. Against his wife's better judgment (Hagit is a judge by profession), he explores relationships at once personal and political - man and wife, father and son, teacher and pupil, Israeli and Arab.

"Celebrated novelist A. B. Yehoshua discusses nine literary works - from the early classics, stories from Hebrew literature, and world literature in order to show how the "moral issue" renders new readings and understandings of the texts."--BOOK JACKET.

"On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy - a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all.". "With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift" -- the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure - to complete his explanation."--BOOK JACKET.

When Ben Attar, the Jewish merchant and tragic hero of A. B. Yehoshua's new novel, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever change the course of his life. Yehoshua, in his masterful novels, has always mined the human psyche and the complex ties that bind people together. But here, in his most ambitious novel to date, he seeks to explore the place where desire and morality meet. And by setting his story in the Middle Ages, in the year 999, Yehoshua has found the perfect backdrop against which to explore the most basic questions of human conduct, and how the formation of religious code emanates from the flesh as much as from the heart and mind.

With the publication of Open Heart, internationally acclaimed Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has written a psychological tour de force that takes as its subject nothing less than love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his internship has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery. This journey brings the supremely rational, coolheaded physician to surrender all his deeply held beliefs when his experience in India awakens an erotic passion that dares to destroy his tidy world as he pursues the illicit love of the administrator's wife.

With the death of his invalid wife, Molkho leaves his home for a freedom measured by the seasons.

CONTENTS.- A poet's continuing silence.- Three days and a child.- Facing the forests.- Flood tide.- A long hot day, his despair, his wife, and his daughter.

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies and his years of loving attention are ended. But his newfound freedom is filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love. Winter sees him away to the operas of Berlin and a comic tryst with a legal advisor who has a sprained ankle. Spring takes him to Galilee and an underage Indian girl. Jerusalem in the summer presents him with an offer from an old classmate to seduce his infertile wife. And the next autumn it is Nina (if only they spoke the same language!), whose yearning for her Russian home leads Molkho back to life. Five Seasons is a finely nuanced, unabashedly realistic novel that provides immense reading pleasure.