The Source

You better put on your big boy reading pants if you want to take on a James Michener novel. It’s in anticipation of a trip to Israel that I decided to reread The Source, a 1965 novel, a book that I read sometime in the late 60s when I was still a teenager. This novel is 1100 pages long. This is historical fiction at its finest. Michener mixes real figures and real locations with real historical figures and very real places. His research is always remarkable.

Through work at the fictional archeological dig Tell Makor, Michener tells the story of Israel over the last 30,000 years, taking the reader up to 1964. Cleverly, he describes the various societies which began and ended over those times while also using the archeological team to write about current day societal issues. This is a master work from a master storyteller.