This book explores the curse of sanity. Amos Oz has spent much of his life in the Shalom Achshav ["Peace Now"] movement in Israel. He and his Jewish friends and Palestinian friends have been struggling to untie a knot which everyone else has been pulling tighter. How to Cure A Fanatic was published in 2006, 28 years after Shalom Achshav was founded. At that point, Amos Oz was like an American abolitionist in 1855. The immediate situation was hopeless, but a future light was beginning to dawn.
Oz modestly suggests the power of humor, even of literature, to resolve political stalemates. I can’t imagine an American intellectual having such faith in books. Oz lives in a crisis so deep that even novelists can help.
He says that when a political settlement is reached, both sides will feel like amputees. How to Cure A Fanatic is a book of political wisdom. I don’t agree with all of it — or perhaps most of it — but I agree with the effort to write elegantly about battles between nations, to see parables in news stories. One can imagine this book being read in the 24th century with piteous delight.
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