Ear­li­er this week, Mar­tin Fletch­er wrote about sto­ries he’s cov­ered for NBC’s Lon­don bureau and about choos­ing a title for his book. His newest book,Walk­ing Israel: A Per­son­al Search for the Soul of a Nation, is now available.

What I loved about writ­ing Walk­ing Israel was meet­ing the peo­ple I came across dur­ing my walk, peo­ple I would nev­er nor­mal­ly have come across, and who direct­ed me towards aspects of Israel that had nev­er occurred to me in my 35 years of report­ing from there: The tour guide who used the four faces of Akkos clock­tow­er to show Jews and Arabs the four faces of the truth: it just depends where you stand”; the botanist whose main goal, when Israel was fight­ing for its exis­tence in 1948, was to save the sea tur­tles; the Tunisian and Moroc­can Jews sit­ting around in Roger’s café in Ashkelon who bare­ly budged as rock­ets land­ed from Gaza, and said if it was up to them they’d make peace with the Arabs in five min­utes but in the mean­time in war, it’s war!”

I loved every­thing about writ­ing the book: the peo­ple I met, the sub­se­quent year of research, and the year of writ­ing and rewrit­ing. But best of all was the reac­tion of my son after he read the fin­ished work. Dad,” he said, next time you go for a long walk some­where I want to come with you.”

Mar­tin Fletch­er spent the last thir­ty years as NBC News Bureau Chief in Tel Aviv. His sec­ond book, Walk­ing Israel: A Per­son­al Search for the Soul of a Nation, is now avail­able. He has been blog­ging all week for the JBC/MJL Author Blog.

Con­sid­ered for decades the gold stan­dard of TV war cor­re­spon­dents” by Ander­son Coop­er, Mar­tin Fletch­er was an NBC News Cor­re­spon­dent and bureau chief in Tel Aviv for near­ly thir­ty years. Fletch­er has won five Emmys and a Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty DuPont Award — a Pulitzer for work in tele­vi­sion — as well as awards from the Over­seas Press Club and Roy­al Soci­ety of Tele­vi­sion. Today, Fletcher’s work as an author is rapid­ly gain­ing an equal­ly impres­sive rep­u­ta­tion. He cur­rent­ly lives in Mex­i­co and New York.