Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

Wright's calmly intrepid reporting on al-Qaeda, in The Looming Tower, and Scientology, in Going Clear, made those the definitive books on their difficult subjects. Now he has taken on the apparently intractable history of Israeli-Arab conflict, seen through the lens of one of the few moments it seemed tractable. With his plain-spoken, almost naive style and his incisive sketches of the men and women who met for two tense weeks in the Maryland woods in 1979, Wright makes clear how unlikely that diplomatic success was and how much it depended on the battle-scarred, idiosyncratic personalities who came to a flawed but durable agreement.