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Title details for The Lion's Gate by Steven Pressfield - Available

The Lion's Gate

On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

by Steven Pressfield
Malcolm Hillgartner
Audiobook
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The bestselling author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel delivers his first work of military nonfiction—an epic narrative of the Six Day War.
June 5, 1967. The fearsome, Soviet-equipped Egyptian Army and its 1000 tanks are massed on Israel’s southern border. Meanwhile, the Syrian Army is shelling the much smaller nation from the north. And to the east, Jordan and Iraq are moving brigades and fighter squadrons into position to attack. Egypt’s President Nasser has declared that the Arab world’s goal is no less than “the destruction of Israel.”
June 10, 1967. The combined Arab armies are in ruins, their air forces totally destroyed. Israel’s citizen-soldiers have seized the Gaza Strip and the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The land under Israeli control has tripled. The charismatic, eye-patch wearing Defense Minister Moshe Dayan has barreled through the Lion’s Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, meeting up with a gang of paratroopers who have already raised the blue and white flag that frames the Star of David.
How on earth did this happen?
Only Steven Pressfield could get the real story from the fighter jocks in the air, the tank commanders through the sand, and the infantrymen on the ground. Through more than 300 hours of interviews conducted in Israel, he has written a gripping chronicle of the six days that changed the Middle East forever. He also captures the universal experience of individual soldiers compelled to stare down mortal fear and move headlong into a firestorm.
The Lion’s Gate blends the immediacy of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, the esprit de corps of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, and the soul of James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers. It will join the indispensable canon of military nonfiction.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 6, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780147519931
      • File size: 403997 KB
      • Duration: 14:01:39

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Malcolm Hillgartner narrates these profiles in a conversational tone. As the author emphasizes in the introduction, this is not a book about the politics, planning, or grand battle plans of Israel's Six-Day War. Rather, it's a look at pieces of the war as seen by people on the ground doing the fighting. There are names listeners will recognize, such as Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, and many more that they won't. But their stories are compelling, made all the more so by an effective reading. These are personal stories told in the first person, and Hillgartner reads them in a conversational tone that is inviting. He lightens the tone when needed and adds gravity when appropriate. His facility with Israeli names and places and Hebrew phrases makes the narration move along easily. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 19, 2014
      The 1967 Six Day War radically changed the balance of power between Israel and its neighbors, and, according to Moshe Dayan, inaugurated the image of the warrior Jew. Excerpting from 63 hours of interviews with Israeli soldiers, Pressfield (The War of Art) provides an up-close-and-personal, if one-sided, view of the war. The soldiers' and flyers' accounts are particularly notable on Operation Mokedâthrough which Israeli pilots effectively won the war in its first hour by destroying the Egyptian Air Forceâand on the battle for the Jerusalem's Old City. For Israelis, the moment when Israeli paratroopers stood at the Western Wall constituted an emotional high point, even a kind of moment of redemption; one soldier, referring to his ancestors who had been killed in the Holocaust, told Pressfield, "if they could know, somehow, even for one second, that I, their grandson, would be standing here... they would suffer death a thousand times and count it as nothing." Pressfield too often sketches scenes without following through with necessary details, and the book could have benefitted from more maps, but it is a colorful and informative view of the war that made contemporary Israel. Photos and maps

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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