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Shimon Peres autobiography to be released

'No Room For Small Dreams' described as an 'ideological will and testament'

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Shimon Peres's autobiography will be published this week, close to a year after Israel's former prime minister and president died aged 93.

No Room For Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel promises to tell the full story of a life he describes as having been “entwined with the birth and construction of Israel”. 

Mr Peres completed work on the book a matter of weeks before his death, of a stroke, on September 28, 2016. 

According to a review in the New York Times, the book amounts "to a kind of ideological will and testament" of arguably Israel's most significant statesman. 

In the week of Mr Peres's death, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the JC:

"Think of each Israeli decade and Peres had a prominent role in it: president in the noughties; Prime Minister and Oslo signatory in the '90s; PM and Finance Minister in the '80s; acting PM and Defence Minister in charge of the Entebbe rescue operation in the '70s; rising star minister in the '60s; key player in the Suez drama, and architect of Israel's secret nuclear programme, in the '50s; close aide to David Ben Gurion, in charge of arms procurement for the embryonic IDF, in the 1940s."

Mr Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, alongside the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, for his role in negotiating the Oslo peace accords.

The anniversary of Peres's death is being marked with a number of events in Israel, including an official state memorial at Mount Herzl national cemetery in Jerusalem on Thursday.

The night before, the Peres Centre for Peace, named in his honour, will host a conference on innovation. The current Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, will attend and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger will be present at a reception later that evening.

The Israel Postal Company also released a commemorative stamp featuring a photograph of Mr Peres.

The autobiography will first be released in English, with French and Hebrew versions to follow.

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