1947 - The UN declares that the British Mandate over Palestine will come to an end. In May 1948 Israel and Arab Palestine will be divided into two independent states. The Arab world reacts immediately: There will be no Jewish state; it will be driven into the sea! Sixty-five million Arabs against six hundred thousand Israeli Jews. Britain has washed its hands of the problem. The United States, under the guise of the Neutrality Act, makes it a felony for any American to supply either side with any arms. Americans Al Schwimmer, Hank Greenspun, and Charlie Winters boldly defy the Neutrality Act and risk convictions by purchasing twenty-three former Nazi Messerschmitt Bf-109s in Czechoslovakia, painting out the swastikas on the tails with Jewish stars of David, and smuggling them to Israel; founding a "Panamanian" airline and flying seven large aircraft out of Panama "to do an aerial survey," but never returning; securing a huge cache of ammunition from a sympathetic junk dealer in Hawaii; smuggling weapons to Mexico on a hijacked yacht, and ultimately shipping them "to Nationalist China" - via Israel. Stripped of most of their rights as US citizens, Schwimmer is recruited to start a small aircraft maintenance plant in Israel, which will become Israel Aircraft Industries, a billion-dollar-a-year operation; Greenspun purchases a defunct newspaper, which he turns into the Las Vegas Sun and is among the first to call witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy to account; Winters returns to importing and exporting fruit and diamonds between Israel and the United States. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when France reneges on its commitment to sell Israel fifty advanced fighter jets, the trio manages to "steal" plans from a friendly engineer in Geneva. Within six months Israel turns out its own homegrown Mach 2 fighter aircraft. And that's just the beginning. International best-selling author Hugo N. Gerstl has crafted a tantalizing, rewarding, magnificently readable tour de force based on the true life stories of three of Israel's most unheralded heroes, cementing and enhancing his reputation as a master storyteller.

Brilliant Artists in Trio A volume of three feature pieces. 1. Janet Baker, the Wind in Her Hair. Opera's Dame Janet, now retired from the stage to song performance, takes to sea on a yacht, the better to understand the rhythms of Elgar's Sea Pictures, of which she is already the world's authority. She was playing with the sound of the waves from the bow, it seemed to me, "Never before under sail', she said. It was very close to song. 2. St Brigid and the Wizard. Paula Dawson is an artist who works with holograms. Most famous of her works is a virtual re-creation of her 1989 New Year's Eve party room the following morning, in which the debris recalls the actions in time past. Here, she builds a hologram of the Holy Spirit, for the worshippers in St Brigid's Church, working throughout the night on a tremor-insulated stage near Adelaide. 3. Max Gillies, the Character Onstage. Watches one of the finest character actors in the world, perform political satire to live audiences. Gillies' own face is not as well known as those he has played behind, and whenever bailed up by some passing admirer he is deeply pleased, but his eyes cloud as if with a passing fear that he may be asked to prove himself now with a short performance as Ronald Regan or the Queen of England, right here on the footpath.