Great Regulars: The fact that Taha Muhammad Ali is a gifted poet

and a very appealing personality--[Adina] Hoffman writes of his ability to charm Arab, Jewish, and American audiences alike--makes him easy for the reader to care about. But it does not make his fate inherently more significant than those of hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who suffered the same injuries. Here, in fact, lies the main trouble with Hoffman's book: she is writing about one man, but she is really interested in what she calls, with polemical exaggeration, "the Palestinian century."

Thus she devotes much of the first half of the book to recounting the Jewish-Arab clashes of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in Israel's War of Independence. By focusing on Saffuriyya and its people, Hoffman makes the human costs of this conflict come to life, and she clearly means to confront American and Jewish readers with the facts of Palestinian suffering. But this Saffuriya-centric approach also allows Hoffman to neglect the larger history of the war and the period, and to portray Israel as the aggressor in what was in fact a war in defense of its very existence. Her retrospective indignation is not the best lens through which to view this complex history.

from Adam Kirsch: Nextbook: The Reader: A Life Between Lines

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