Through Youthful Eyes

In the 1970s, when I worked on CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning, our producer Mark Starowicz drummed one rule into our heads: “Make sure you report accurately the number of steps from the sidewalk up to the doors of the U.S. Capitol. If you get the small things right, the audience will be more inclined to trust you on the big ones.”

These wise words came back to me as I began reading Peacekeeper’s Daughter. As Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt describes how she and her Canadian family wandered around Jerusalem, trying to get used to the Middle East, where they’d be living for the next eleven months, she writes that they were staying at the American Colony Hotel in the Muslim Quarter. That’s wrong: the Muslim Quarter, like the Jewish, Armenian, and Christian Quarters, is located inside the walls of the Old City, while that hotel is situated in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Recalling when her family climbed to the Temple Mount, she refers to the golden-roofed Dome of the...