Revenge: A Story of Hope.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Political booknotes: vengeance is mined

IN THE WINTER OF 1986, LAURA Blumenfeld's father was shot and lightly wounded by a Palestinian militant as he strolled through the labyrinthine alleyways of Jerusalem's old city. The attempted killing was a random attack--the gunman was part of a terrorist cell that set out to kill U.S. and British tourists in the aftermath of the U.S. bombing of Libya--but Washington Post reporter Blumenfeld took it personally. A decade later, during a "honeymoon year" spent in Jerusalem with her husband, a New York City prosecutor, Blumenfeld embarked on an all-consuming hunt for her father's would-be killer. As Blumenfeld writes early in her quest: "I was inhabited by a grandiose thought: My father's injury should not go unanswered."

Blumenfeld's search for the assailant is the core narrative behind Revenge: A Story of Hope, but the detective story is only one part of this meandering, intermittently fascinating book. For Blumenfeld isn't interested merely in finding the terrorist who fired the bullet; she has an equally obsessive need to understand her own motivations, and to confront the universal human impulse for revenge. This quest leads her through the blood-soaked Middle East, where she interviews Mossad agents, Holocaust survivors, and the then Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu about collective and personal vengeance. She also tracks down family members of victims of the 1986 terrorist shooting spree to find out how they coped with the loss or injury of their loved ones. And she takes the reader on a Cook's Tour of vengeance "experts" around the world, from black-veiled widows in Mafia country in Sicily to imams in the Iranian spiritual center of Qom to peasants in the dusty mountain hamlets of northern Albania. "I was looking for the shooter, but I also was looking for some kind of wisdom," she writes. "So much of life's turmoil comes from individuals or groups trying to settle a score. For years, from my perch at the Post, I had written about some dramatic examples ... Now I wanted to break it down and study it. I wanted to master revenge."

Her excursions far afield yield some gut-wrenching stories and some interesting anthropological detail: In Albanian villages ruled by a medieval set of laws known as the canon, for example, she meets families who for decades have never ventured beyond their doorstep to avoid being killed by descendants of murder victims. And there's an emotional conversation with a Mossad agent named Rafi Eitain who...