ExNotes Review: The Source

By Joe Berk

Did you ever read a book twice?  I’ve done so a few times, but never with as long a time between readings as James Michener’s The Source.  I first read it when I was 14 years old.  And then I read it again last month.  That’s a gap of nearly six decades.   What surprised me enormously was that I remembered a lot of it from my first reading.

You might wonder:  Why would a 14-year-old kid, a gearhead even then, read The Source?   I had been to Israel with my Dad a year earlier, which was quite an opportunity back in those days.  Dad was a trapshooter, and he was on the US Olympic team to Israel’s Maccabiah Games.  It was quite a trip, and seeing the places I had only heard about in Sunday school was a real adventure.  The Source cemented a lot of what I had seen in Israel in my mind.  It brought my visit into focus.  Normally, I would have had my nose buried in Cycle magazine, but that trip to Israel broadened my horizons.  Our most recent trip to Spain and seeing cities and places where the Spanish Inquisition (which figured prominently in The Source) rekindled my interest, so I bought a new copy of The Source on Amazon and I read it again.

The only difference I could discern between the book I read 58 years ago and the one I read last month was the price and the cover photo.  Today’s The Source cover photo features the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest sites.  Back in the day, the cover featured a Jewish menorah (a candelabra), which figures prominently in our faith.

The Source is a novel with an historical context.  It’s the story of an archeological dig set in Israel just before Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-1948, but the dig and its characters provide the framework for a series of stories as the tell is excavated.  A tell is a mound created by succeeding civilizations building one on top of another, and in The Source, the generations stretch all the way back to prehistoric times.

At 1,080 pages The Source is not a light read, although Michener does a great job morphing from one story into the next.  If you enjoy a good read, if you are interested in Israel, and if you want to know more about the beginnings and evolution of the world’s three great religions, you might want to pick up a copy of The Source.

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