Book review: "Border Crosser" by Avner Shur

(Read in Hebrew)

"Border Crosser" is a biography of Avraham Arnan, the founder of Sayeret Matcal - Israel's most elite and prestiged commando unit. It was founded by Arnan in 1957 and since then became the chief field-intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism unit of the Israeli army.

While the topic of the book is interesting, it's written so badly that reading it is almost painful. The writer uses a vastly exaggerated amount of metaphors and poetic language. I've never read anything quite like this before. It's as if the author prepared a certain amount of metaphors to use in the book, but then skipped the elimination process and pushed them all in. In some pages you actually have to work hard to find the scarce passages of meaning and information in the forest of poetical blabber. Reading such prose is extremely tiring.

So I wouldn't recommend this book. If the topic interests you, it's better to find something else. I'm sure there are other books on the topic.