In his last post, Gre­go­ry Lev­ey wrote about late-night Mid­dle East radio com­men­tary. 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 Vis­it­ing Scribe.

For some rea­son I don’t real­ly under­stand, if you go to the Ama​zon​.com page for the book I’ve just pub­lished, How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, Ama­zon often makes a strange rec­om­men­da­tion. If you are inter­est­ed in my book, Ama­zon believes, you might also be inter­est­ed in a children’s book called Bax­ter, the Pig Who Want­ed to Be Kosher.

Now, I’ve nev­er read Bax­ter, the Pig Who Want­ed to Be Kosher, which is writ­ten by Lau­rel Sny­der. I guess it could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly be relat­ed to my own book, which is about my attempt to make Mid­dle East peace from the com­fort of my own apart­ment, most­ly so that I wouldn’t have to hear about the fatigu­ing Arab-Israeli con­flict any­more – but, judg­ing by its title, it doesn’t sound likely.

In any case, I am hon­ored to be in the com­pa­ny of Bax­ter and his strange, masochis­tic wish. Even so, it makes me won­der what ratio­nale Ama­zon has for con­nect­ing these two books. Do a lot of peo­ple buy both of them? Do we have a sim­i­lar demo­graph­ic of read­ers? Or is there some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly sim­i­lar about Baxter’s quest and my own?

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.