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Introducing the 2015 Lionel Gelber Finalists. Today’s Nominee: Lawrence Wright
Every day this week, Foreign Policy is featuring an interview with one of the finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, jointly sponsored by FP and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Today’s finalist is New Yorker ...
Every day this week, Foreign Policy is featuring an interview with one of the finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs, jointly sponsored by FP and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Today’s finalist is New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright, whose book, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, chronicles in detail the two painstaking weeks in 1978 when Jimmy Carter brought the Israeli and Egyptian delegations together in the secluded Maryland woods to hammer out a framework for peace. (See FP associate editor Max Strasser’s review of Thirteen Days here.)
The jury citation for Wright’s book is below:
Each chapter reads like the scene in a mystery, filmed on a mountain called Camp David, in Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright. Here are Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat effectively incarcerated at Camp David by public expectations for a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Four days grow to thirteen as human foibles, resentments, greed, and ambition play out in this masterful rendition of a compromise that barely survives the travels home from the set.
And listen to the interview, conducted by Rob Steiner, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School, here:
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