Well, it's been almost three weeks since Unholy Business was published, and I've been speaking about it a lot to people in person and on the radio. I really enjoy talking about the characters I met in the process of writing it. As I said in an earlier post, I felt like I was in my own adventure movie while I was researching it. That doesn't mean that the people involved in it weren't flesh and blood.
I am really grateful to the people who spent time with me in Israel and in the U.S. What struck me most was that a common thread linked them all – the archaeologists, the epigraphers, the theologians, the dealers, the collectors and the police. Everyone had a deep and serious interest in history. They had different ideas about how to honor that interest, but they shared it nonetheless. For most if them, ancient history is as real and relevant as today's news.
I couldn't have completed the project without the assistance of some very learned people, like California professor and archaeologist Jonathan Reed, who generously accompanied me around Israel in my rental car, directing me from region to region and dig to dig, with a running commentary on what it all meant. Reed, and his older counterpart, Sy Gitin, who runs the Albright Institute – an American research center and temporary home for archeologists working in Israel - taught me by example what real-life Indiana Jones are all about.
They are patient, methodical, meticulous people, willing to spend weeks in the blazing desert sun to be rewarded with the most arcane bits and pieces of clay or bronze that, carefully pieced together, may help us moderns get a clearer picture of the world of the ancients.
In journalism, the first thing a cub reporter learns – usually the hard way, by making this very mistake – is the adage: "Never assume, you'll make an ASS out of U and ME. One of the great things about this job, once you get that idea down, is that you are perpetually surprised by people. You set up an interview by letter or phone, you arrive with tape recorder and notebook in hand, and no matter what or who you are meeting, nothing is as ever you imagined it would be.
This was entirely true of every minute I spent in Israel, from the Galilee down into the Negev, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. My preconceived notions about the Middle East, religious believers, scholars, archaeologists, fell away a daily basis. I now have a deeper, richer understanding of that region, and I hope I have been able to transfer that into the pages of the book.
Today, Monday, 11/17 from 3 to 4PM ET, I'll discussed my new book on NPR's Talk of the Nation.
Also check out a review of my book from Barnes & Noble.
Learn more about this book throughout November in the Bright Ideas from Bestselling Authors group on Gather. Click here to join.
Click here to buy the book.
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Comments: 5
I finished your book the other day and there is so many things that are running through my head about it, that it is hard to pinpoint where to start.
I will say this for now....I really enjoyed it and boy did it make me look at how I feel about the bible, archeology, history and a lot of other things.
I will bet that your journey to writing this book would be almost as interesting as the book itself. You had to learn, travel and meet so many really interesting people.
I am not religious, so people look at me funny until I tell them about your book. Their answers have been nothing if not interesting and thought provoking.
Every time I talk about this idea of proof for faith, which is what got me interested in the story from the start, I learn something new about my own assumptions. For example, I tell people, everyone involved in this book looks at these objects from point of belief, a kind of lens. And then I have to ask myself, what is my lens. Because I bring my own belief system, as unfocused and haphazard as it is, as a person without organized religion in my background, to everything I look at too.
What's especially interesting with this particular story is that science and belief commingle.