Historian Tom Segev's new biography of the Israeli prime minister and Zionist hero David Ben-Gurion chronicles 20th-century episodes still salient today. //

Segev tells Ben-Gurion’s story happening-by-happening. His go-to format is to provide an impressionistic account of the outcome of some notable incident in Ben-Gurion’s life, then to back up and fill in details. This can be refreshing when the conclusion is an intriguing historical moment or anecdote. But in this 600-page doorstop of a book, the writing tactic is repeated without fail for chapter after chapter.

The technique also leads to confusion when a reader comes to the book with little prior knowledge of the inner workings of, say, the interwar international Zionist Congress, and can’t begin to fathom what picture Segev is trying to paint with his conclusion put ahead of the facts. Yet Segev’s handling of the facts is thorough and masterful, and we can draw our own conclusions if we don’t like his. //

Toward the end of his life, he flirted with Buddhism, but Ben-Gurion’s true religion was always the nation of Israel, and for nearly 30 years, the two were practically synonymous. The twentieth century was the deathbed for a great many fanciful nineteenth-century notions. It turned out that David Ben-Gurion’s dream of a Jewish nation wasn’t one of them. Israel survives and thrives long after his passing.