When the Missus is away

PROBLEM: Listen, Boss, the Missus is in town with the car, so I didn't have the means to get to any hot-breaking interviews and also it's been raining "cats and dogs" out here in my valley, so what's the Ol' Columnist to do.
Did I hear someone say, 'Go to the bookshelf'?
Am I really hearing voices again?
Get the Doc on the phone.
In the meantime, there are a couple of books staring at me. Ones, I have certainly read time and again.
Excuse me, I'll reach for one of my favorites, 'O Jerusalem!' (1972) by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, the authors of 'Is Paris Burning' and 'Or I'll Dress You in Mourning'.
Of course, the topic is centred on Jerusalem, my favorite city, having worked there as a newspaper correspondent in the late 1990s and now edit and write for a 2005 Jerusalem Sun website (www.kayecorbett.com/).
As the book jacket says: It is the most universal of man's cities: Jerusalem, the mystic heart of three great religions, condemned to pay for the passions stirred by its stones by being, through 40 centuries, the most bitterly disputed site in the world. Their story -- the fruit of five years of intensive research and many thousands of interviews -- is the epic drama of 1948, in which the Arabs and the Jews, heirs to generations of bitter conflict in a land sacred to them both, fought each other for the city of Jerusalem and for the hopes of fulfillment it represented to each. Here, for the first time, is an account of that struggle which encompasses the full spectrum of its participants, whose experiences, emotions and acts of bravery have been meticulously brought together and illumined in this monumental and dramatic work.
Collins and Lapierre describe the three separate groups of people this way:
The Jews -- some of them descendants of the old rabbinical families that had dwelt in Jerusalem for centuries; others the offspring of Zionism's early pioneers who had come to Palestine to reclaim their lost homeland by sweat and sacrifice; still others the remnant of the Six Million, trying to rebuild their shattered existence in new surroundings.
The Arabs -- resentful of what they felt to be an effort to seize a land they believed theirs in the name of a crime they had not committed -- the persecution of the Jews in the Christian West; driven to disaster by incompetent politicians; deeding the world the seeds of a new tragedy in their refugee camps.
The British -- whose 30-year mandate in the Holy Land had begun in November 1917 with General Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem -- and with the pronouncement of the Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish National Home in a land whose Arab inhabitants had been led to expect a state of their own.
Against this background of history, the authors play out the day-by-day, minute-by-minute human record of the collision between two peoples, linking the stories of countless participants, great and small, from high commanders to simple soldiers, from famous world figures -- Ben-Gurion, Harry S. Truman, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Golda Meir. King Abdullah of Jordan -- to the countless men and women who fought and died beneath the stones and monuments of Jerusalem.
With the conflict over Jerusalem more prominent today than ever before in world history, the book's epilogue reminds us of the words of the ancient psalm of David:
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem ...
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within
Thy palaces.
Seven years later -- in 1979 -- David Halberstam chronicled 'The Powers That Be', another favorite on my bookshelf. It states on the book's cover its essence. "Within the kingdom of the media: how Luce's Time, Paley's CBS, the Grahams' Washington Post and the Chandlers' Los Angeles Times became rich and powerful and changed forever the shape of American politics and society.
Often book jacket prose is midleading, but not Haberstam, for he does chronicle the stunning rise in power and influence of America's communications empires. It opens our eyes to the domination of government by the media. It takes us behind the scenes and shows us the new shapes of power in America today. It brings us close to the men and women who developed and wielded that power power, and wield it now.
It's now been almost 26 years since Halberstam penned this 70-page epic, but the influence of some of the names ring loudly even in 2005.
Take for instance, Halberstam in describing: CBS is William S. Paley, society figure and commercial visionary -- and it is Edward R. Murrow and James Aubrey and Frank Stanton and dozens of others who Halberstam brings brilliantly to life ...
Time Inc. is Henry Luce, haunted by his Chinese boyhood, driven and molded by his idea of duty and his inhibitions -- and it is Luce's star reporter, enemy, and friend, Teddy White.
The Los Angeles Times is, of course, the Chandler family -- "a dynasty, one of the few remaining in American society."
And the Washington Post is the Grahams and Ben Bradlee and the boys of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein.
These words on both 'O Jerusalem' and 'The Powers That Be' come from their book covers, and not from my knowledge bank. However, Collins, Lapierre and Halberstam are heroes to me, for the length of time they spent on writing such epics.
I know, for I have just finished writing the 1,500-page, three-volume series entitled, "The Glory of the King," or as I have called it on many a sleepless night, "16 years of blood, sweat and tears."