The Book of Telling begins with an old photograph. A group of young people grin at the camera. In the background, the dunes of Tel Aviv, it is 1948. In the middle crouches a handsome man: Itzhak Bentov, the author's father. But, as Sharona Muir soon reveals, this is not just a bunch of optimistic Israelis, and her father was not just the eccentric "invention-a-minute Ben" and New Age guru that Americans would later come to know. This is Hemmed, Israel's first team of secret defence scientists, and Itzhak Bentov was the maker of Israel's first rocket, on the eve of the first Israeli-Arab war. Other photographs send Muir (an American poet on the cusp of middle age) on a trip into the minefield of her childhood. There, she finds a tender but increasingly erratic father, speaking an exotic version of English, and teaching her the laws of physics and metaphysics. Torn between her divorced parents and intimidated by a Russian witch of a stepmother, who serves borscht the colour of blood, the young Sharona wonders whether her father loves her -- then watches in disbelief as he descends into delusional mania. With a child's common sense, she keeps asking him, "Daddy, are you sure?". When finally he allows himself to remember fragments of his murdered family's pre-war life in Slovakia, it only quickens his dissociation from reality. "The Holocaust with all its abominable horsemen and chariots charged straight at him, alone on the field of memory, without weapons, without cover". With these difficult memories in tow, Muir flies to Jerusalem, rents an apartment and sets about interviewing the people from the photograph, and some outside of it. They include: an elderly, enigmatic entrepreneur who is "a one-man Israel". and Hemmed engineers who talk at length about the good old days, making rudimentary weapons from scratch (on a budget of $3,000). Bentov's "dinky little rocket" was 15 inches long, and was made from water pipe, the only available steel. The cordite used to fuel it was stolen from the British Army. While Muir swelters in the desert summer, one engineer tells her how he removed the "music-playing arm" of his gramophone in order the machine can be used as a revolving shooting target. This is the kind of sacrifice that they all made in Hemmed, Muir concludes, in order "do something for the country", and it is left for us to speculate whether they sacrifice part of their humanity in the process. Sharona Muir's gifts for narrative, cultural insight and imagery make this memoir a brave and remarkable book. As a tender, but unflinching memoir of a lost soul, it is hard to forget. As a personalized account of a country shaped by desperation, it contains the kernel of the Israel we know -- or think we know -- today". The Times Literary Supplement, March 10 2006 issue, by Kapka Kassabova.