Levin has filled his pages with modern Poloniuses, masters of digression, and with moments rich in fact and feeling - each of which he spends paragraphs unpacking. All the while, the book claims the reader's time, hours and hours of it. Yet miraculously few of its 1,030 pages, which cover four days in Gurion's life, seem extraneous . [It's] a chain of interlocking symbols, a charm bracelet of a book . It's as though, merely by reading, we are committing an act of faith. In the end, his contradictions leave us - as religion often does - exalted and alienated both.