“Travel” Articles

Since October 7, 2023, the world has been focused on the Holy Land. And not in a positive or hopeful way. So what better time for Bret Lott’s latest book—Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land—to come out? As he notes in his foreword, Lott delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the summer of 2023, when it was possible to find in Israel the subtitle’s “hope.” And find it he does.

For me, as an author of fiction who takes inspiration from a historian like Francis Parkman, perhaps the most salient of Parkman’s features is his prose style. Few can match his cadences and powers of description. The ability to describe a scene vividly is an underestimated and for the most part a modern virtue of the prose writer; in an age of screens it has fallen into abeyance.