Ross, who served most notably as President Clinton's special envoy to the Middle East, has produced a work that is simultaneously comprehensive, quite fair-minded and somewhat ponderous. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a history of Arab-­Israeli peace efforts per se, but rather of the evolution of Israeli-American diplomatic relations — except these two matters are so inextricably linked as to pose an almost semantic difference. Because of that linkage, and because of American fears of repercussions from Arab nations should they appear too cozy with Israel, those relations have not always been as close as one might assume. While President Truman famously recognized Israel just 11 minutes after its declaration of statehood in 1948, he and his immediate successors assumed a decidedly cautious approach. It wasn't until 1962, 14 years after Israel's founding, that the Kennedy administration approved the first arms sale to the Jewish state — and purely defensive weapons at that — and not until 1964 that an Israeli prime minister was accorded the honor of an official White House visit. While Ross enumerates a number of factors leading to the steady strengthening of ties between the two nations, certainly a crucial one was the deepening of the Cold War and the Balkanization of the region into rival Soviet and American camps. www.amazon.com/