Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv: From Dream to City
$34.00
Tel Aviv, by Joachim Schlor, has many good ideas and interesting historical facts spread throughout its 300 pages, but unfortunately Schlor buries them in a poorly organized book, which has little forward momentum and a bad layout. There is a great deal of repetition of a few central ideas, with little expansion on those ideas. That said, the work has some merits. It presents Tel Aviv against the backdrop of other cities in the world, shows how it is unique and how different; in general Schlor is at his best when reporting on the city as an idea and an execution of that idea and its place in the country and in the lives of people. When Schlor steers off this trail, the book loses its way.

A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C)
$24.95
By the time one is done reading Barbara Mann's "A Place in History," one of the richest interdisciplinary studies of the creation of Jewish national culture to date, it is hard to understand why we waited so long for a scholar to carefully examine the crucial construction of Tel Aviv which, for most Israelis, has long represented the true center of national life and identity. A confident and wonderfully lively scholar, as familiar with European modernist responses to the city as she is with the lyrical impulses of Chaim Nahman Bialik, Leah Goldberg, and other Hebrew poets, Mann draws with wonderful skill on the rich archival sources she investigated. Another useful feature of "A Place in History" is the generous inclusion of numerous black and white reproductions of artists such as Gutman and Reuven Rubin, as well as Mann's own deeply evocative photographs of the city that clearly lives in both her heart and intellect. Readers will also appreciate the book's sensible organization which moves logically from perceptive discussion of utopian visions of the new Hebrew city in Jewish European discourse (many readers may be surprised to learn that Herzl's 1902 novel Altnueland was not the first Zionist utopian novel), through the city's life in the early 20th-century until the rapid years of growth after statehood. In a final chapter that is at once moving and richly analytical, Mann addresses the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in terms of the transformation of public space as well as in narratives by Etgar Keret, Alona Kimchi, and other artistic renderings of the national trauma. "A Place in Histor"y is consistently rewarding, offering rich understandings of early Zionist culture in its myriad forms, and unprecedented analysis of Tel Aviv as a deeply conflicted but always critically vital site and source of literary and artistic expression.

Tel Aviv Short Stories
$23.99
Just as Israelis take you into their hearts when they meet you, these stories take you into the heart of Tel Aviv, as experienced by "embedded" local English speakers.

Wallpaper City Guide: Tel Aviv
$8.95
Wallpaper* City Guides not only suggest where to stay, eat, and drink, but what the tourist passionate about design might want to see, whether he or she has a week or just 24 hours in the city. The guides feature up-and-coming areas, landmark buildings in an `Architour', design centers, and a selection of the best shops to buy items unique to the particular city.

Wallpaper* City Guides present travelers with a fast-track ticket to the chosen location. The edited guides offer the best, the most exciting, and the most beautiful of the featured city.

In addition to looking beautiful, the guides are expertly designed with function as a priority. They have tabbed sections so the tourist can easily find what he or she is looking for. Also included are color-coded city maps, rate and currency cards, and an easy navigational tool. They are the ultimate combination of form and function.

Compiled by the well-traveled editorial team of Wallpaper* and by an extraordinary network of international correspondents, the guides are truly the insider's guide to each featured city. The contributors to these guides have put their heads together to come up with fascinating, efficient guides that keeps the hip, urban traveler with his or her finger on the pulse.

The City Guides are being published as Wallpaper* magazine celebrates its tenth anniversary. For the past decade, Wallpaper* has been the first to uncover and enticingly present the best in new design and urban travel spots across the globe. The City Guides are the perfect way to present a decade of experience in one precisely edited guide to each of the 40 cities to be published in 2007.