Warrior: An Autobiography - Hardcover

A hero in each of Israel's wars, the architect of Israel's campaign to destroy Arab terrorist bases in Lebanon, perhaps the most daring and successful commander in Israel's extraordinary military history who went on to be one of its most visible and important political figures, Ariel Sharon (1928-2014) was always a warrior. The public man was well-known, if not necessarily well understood, but the private man was always obscured by Sharon's dazzling career and powerful personality. In this brilliantly readable and dramatic autobiography, the real Sharon appears; a man of complex depths. And passions, of awesome courage and great compassion; a loving father; a general who commands not alone the respect but the love of his troops; warrior; farmer; visionary and ruthless pragmatist. Sharon writes of his childhood, as the son of parents who came from Russia in the wake of the Revolution and Civil War - his father a stubborn individualist who fought a lifelong battle against the collectivism of the "moshav" and taught his son the virtues of individualism and hard work; his mother a woman who trained to be a doctor only to find her laboring on a collective farm, adapting to the harsh demands of the "Yishuv", not unlike the American frontier in so many respects, with a courage that she passed on to her son. He writes about his career, his battles, both with the enemy and with his opponents in the Israeli army and government, with frankness, a brilliant gift for detail, and an instinctive eel for the good anecdote and the telling phrase, that place this book among the most important and readable of modern historic documents.