SMITH'S GAZELLE

by Lionel Davidson

Book Overview

'Beautiful, lyrical, sensitive and meaningful . . . It deserves to be read and re-read.' "Los Angeles Times" Two deadly enemies - a young Arab rebel and a Jewish runaway - meet in a remote valley to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000I748DU
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Book Club Associates
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.

Customer Reviews

My favorite book, hands down

This is a lovely, wistful fantasy, that never fails to move me; I read it about once a year, since I first discovered it almost 20 years ago. I can only wonder who has the screen rights to this humorous, touching, book.

Thriller and a parable

Smith's Gazelle succeeds on many levels - as the story of Bedu and kibbutzim co-existing as children, fighting as adults; as the story of an endangered specie whose fragile durability is emblematic of the shared hopes of the common people in disputed land; as a story of conservation and nature. Davidson writes with genius from the points of view of a crazed Bedouin shepherd without a nose, of a nine year old Bedouin boy, of a nine year old Israeli boy. His love for his story and its people shines through, and the story moves with a briskness which is rare in something so well-written. It's a hugely good book.

Adventure-mystery set in Israel about endangered species

It has been more than a decade since I read Lionel Davidson's Smith's Gazelle, but I remember it as a delight. Davidson, an Englishman and an Israeli, sets his story in Israel, as his protagonists collaborate with an Israeli officer in trying to locate a rare species of gazelle that they are not sure even still exists. It is hard to convey what makes this book such a delight. More economically plotted that Davidson's earlier novels (Rose of Tibet, etc.), and offering fewer "thrills" and dangers, it nevertheless may be the best of this master storyteller's works.