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A Crack in the
Earth
 A
Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley
“A graceful, erudite guide leads
us across a fractured land.”
— Kirkus Reviews
"Watzman is a talented storyteller,
deftly engaging readers interested in the Earth's constant
evolution, along with those more likely to be interested
in the humanity affected by it. With a nice sense of
irony and the absurd, the American-born Watzman makes
a lively tale out of his travels in the valley, lending
a practiced ear to experts and plain folks alike. .
. . a thoroughly enjoyable read."
-- Publishers Weekly
Fractured
Land
"Haim Watzman's 'Crack in the Earth'
is a graceful travelogue that blends science and storytelling."
by Sandee Brawarsky
- The Jewish Week
"Watzman’s characters are
diverse and thoughtful, ideological yet internally conflicted.
He himself - at once deeply religious yet politically
liberal, bound to both God and to science, confident
yet continuing to ask questions of self-identity - presents
a living example of values that many would claim are
fundamentally incompatible. And he does this with grace,
humility and humor, and with respect and sensitivity
to the eclectic characters he finds on Israel’s
Route 90." more...
-Daniel
Orenstein, Ha'aretz, Sept. 7, 2007
The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from
the Red Sea to Lebanon, was ripped open millions of
years ago by vast forces within the earth. This geological
object has also been a part of human history ever since
early humans used it as a path in their journey out
of Africa. And for a quarter of a century it has been
part of the biography of Haim Watzman, an Israeli journalist.
In the autumn of 2004, as his country
was riven by a fierce debate over its borders, Watzman
took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the way
he met scientists who try to understand the rift through
the evidence lying on its surface—an archaeologist
who reconstructs the fallen altars of a long-forgotten
people, a zoologist whose study of bird societies has
produced a theory of why organisms cooperate, and a
geologist who thinks that the valley will some day be
an ocean. He encountered people whose life and work
on the shores of the Dead Sea and Jordan River have
led them to dream of paradise and to seek to build Gardens
of Eden on earth—a booster for a chemical factory,
the director of a tourist site, and an aging socialist
farmer who curates a museum of idols. And he discovered
that the geography’s instability is mirrored in
the volatility of the tales that people tell about the
Sea of Galilee.
As an observant Jew who has written extensively
about science and scholarship, Watzman strives to understand
the valley in all its complexity—its physical
facts, its role in human history and in his own life,
and the myths it has engendered. He realizes that human
beings can never see the rift in isolation. “It
is the stories that men and women have told to explain
what they see and what they do as a result that create
the rift as we see it . . . As hard as we try to comprehend
the landscape itself, it is humanity that we find.”
Watzman’s poetic evocation of the
scientific and the human is a unique chronicle of a
quest for knowledge.
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