The quest continues, the quest to clear out my bookshelves. For about the fifth straight time, I chose a book, not with the idea of enjoyment, but with the idea of gaining space. But, my choice wasn’t just to get rid of a book. Enjoyment was also on my mind, or at least learning something. The book was Abba Eben: An Autobiography. He was an Israeli diplomat and scholar.

I remembered his name from my teen and young adult years. His name came up in newspapers, his face was on TV. He spoke before the UN, took part in negotiation sessions. For most of us, he was the face of Israel for me.

The book is a 610 pg, hardback tome with smallish font. It is extremely detailed in descriptions of Israeli politics. The 6-Day war of 1967 takes 100 pages to describe. The 1973 Yom Kippur war, a 30-day campaign, took another hundred pages. Every conversation with another nation’s diplomats, every telegram, every phone call seems to be documented in the book. That made it somewhat boring as an autobiography, but interesting as a history. It certainly wasn’t what I expected.

Since the book was published in 1977 (as Eben left intense public service) and Eben died in 2002 at age 87, a lot of his life is not covered. That gave an unbalanced feeling. This would have been better as a memoir, maybe titled My Role in Israel’s First Thirty Years. The book succeeds with that title and focus and would have been about a 500 page book. But it really fails as a true autobiography.

So should you go out and find and read this almost 50-year-old book? Only if you’re a history nerd, or want to know more about Israel’s formative years, it’s a great book. For those reasons, I give it 4-stars. But it is not a keeper. Today it goes in the donation box.