Battling for Peace A Memoir Signed by Shimon Peres - 1995

NY: Random House, 1995. Book. Fine. Hardcover. Signed by Author(s). 1st Edition. Signed on a bookplate for the "Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County Corporate Luncheon - January 17, 1997". An inviting exercise in autobiography by Shimon Peres, a man of paradoxical traits: an optimistic dove in Arab relations who nonetheless founded Israel's "Doomsday'' atomic program. Readers who look for clues into Peres's complex psyche here will not be disappointed. An early influential headmaster of his "believed that Zionism should and must offer far-reaching concessions to the Arabs,'' and his mentor, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unlike Golda Meir and others, fought hard to accept the partition plan that offered Israel a fraction of its present size. By age 26, Peres was already a key defense operative. Long before he would stun his nation and the world with his secret diplomatic coup in Oslo, Peres was unnerving his superiors with under-the-table deals for weaponry, the most significant being the atomic reactor project arranged with France. Peres enjoyed better relations with Yassir Arafat than he did with Yitzhak Rabin. Young Shimon Persky took the name Peres because one naturalist rendered this biblical Hebrew term to mean eagle. As luck would have it, everyone else considered this bird to be a vulture. Fluid, factual, and occasionally anecdotal, this is an insightful autobiography. 1st edition, early printing. .