Sandy Tolan, Author of 'The Lemon Tree'

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan, offers readers an easy-to-follow journey through a maddeningly stubborn conflict that has infused global politics since the 1940s. Based on his 1998 NPR documentary, Tolan personalizes the Arab-Israeli conflict by tracing the intertwined lives of a Palestinian refugee named Bashir Al-Khairi and a Jewish settler named Dalia Eshkenazi Landau. The pair is connected through a stone home in Ramla, now part of Israel. The Lemon Tree is a clear-eyed and steady ride into deeply felt and ever-volatile territory.  Tolan, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism at USC, will discuss his book and the situation in the Middle East.