In his last posts, Gre­go­ry Lev­ey wrote about late-night Mid­dle East radio com­men­tary and ama­zon rec­om­men­da­tions with his book. He is the author of the recent­ly pub­lished How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment and he has been blog­ging for the JBC/MJL author blog­ging series.

In the var­i­ous radio, print, and TV appear­ances I’ve been doing to pro­mote my new book, I often get the same ques­tion: Did you end up mak­ing peace in the Mid­dle East?

My book is called How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less: With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, so this is a nat­ur­al enough ques­tion, but I still find it a bit for­ward. After all, why would I give away the end­ing to my book?

If peo­ple want to know whether or not I actu­al­ly made peace in the Mid­dle East from the com­fort of my apart­ment, they are sim­ply going to have to read the book all the way to the end to find out.

And if you think that I’m going to give away the end­ing in this blog post, then you are sore­ly mis­tak­en. I can tell you that in my attempt to make Mid­dle East peace, I spoke to peo­ple from all over the polit­i­cal spec­trum, from friends of Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu to a for­mer advi­sor to Yass­er Arafat. I spoke to spies, lob­by­ists, politi­cians, and thou­sands of Jew­ish grand­moth­ers. I also did com­bat train­ing with a rightwing Jew­ish para­mil­i­tary group, inves­ti­gat­ed a sup­posed ​“online sui­cide bomb­ing,” went under cov­er as an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, and end­ed up at a real-life cas­tle owned by a cape-wear­ing bil­lion­aire who thinks he is a super­hero called ​“Peace­man.” I can tell you all that, but I can’t tell you if I end­ed up mak­ing peace in the Mid­dle East.

It’s called ​“sus­pense,” people.

Gre­go­ry Levey’s sec­ond book, How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, has just been released.