In the months that have passed since his retirement as Israel's controversial, longtime prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir has set down the story of his extraordinary life, from the years of conspiracy and deep cover in the underground which fought for Jewish independence in the Palestine of the 1940s, to the decade ha spent in the shadows of the Mossad, and to his emergence into national and international prominence as the helmsman of Israel's complex, often painful, always precarious foreign and domestic involvements.