In Jerusalem Calling, author Joel Schalit--a tireless thinker who has a limpid prose style--works through a range of topics in our "post-everything world." He considers Nirvana's rise to the top of the music charts, Marxist philosophers, punk culture, globalization, the impotence of the Left versus the recent successes of the Right's rhetoric, the Christian Right's response to September 11. Though diverse and seemingly unrelated, Schalit never lets one of his ideas, concerns, themes dangle--he always comes back full circle.

Schalit has a captivating history of his own: Born to one of Israel's founding families, he spent his childhood in various international cities, completed his high school education in the Pacific Northwest, then attained two degrees in theology, a solid background in music, and a formidable knowledge of leftist theories. For most people, such a diverse background would have meant some form of intellectual inertia, an implosion of the self, but Schalit successfully utilizes it to articulate a persuasive and progressive view of the modern world. Schalit is a thinker of our times--a writer who is fluent in both the old world (religion) and post world (Nirvana).

In Jerusalem Calling, which is his first book, Schalit reserves his opinions of Israel for the end, which is the most biographical part of the book. Here, much of the preceding material (theories, anecdotes, criticism) comes into focus through the lens of Schalit's life. And as if a projector, we see on the wall of his narrative an original and intimate view of the continuing struggles in the Middle East.

Of course, this is a timely book. How could it not be in light of recent world events? But its combination of the current and the historical, the profane and the religious, punk culture and leftist politics, forms an original understanding of these events. HAGAR SHIRMAN