PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMokhtefi’s story is unique in many respects but her \'enlightenment\'— witnessing colonial complicity in a society struggling to deal with the memory of the recent war—closely parallels how many leftists arrived at \'Third Worldist\' politics during this period: in large part as a direct response to the institutional left’s dramatic failure to live up to the values of solidarity and universalism it preached ... Although...connections drawn by Césaire, Fanon, and the Panthers give a wider sense of the internationalism underpinning Mokhtefi’s book, the latter part of her story largely deals with the waning of an internationalist left, exemplified by the decline of the Panthers and the dissipation of any semblance of a socialist-oriented project in Algeria ... today, too often the appeal to the universal is deployed in a facile, or even ungenerous and unhistorical manner, as a moralizing reflex against the perceived failures of \'identity\' politics. What is powerful about Mokhtefi’s writing is that it does not fall into such a trap. Where appeals to the universal are often easy rhetorical gestures, her story is informed by the experience and sensitivity to the sort of contradictions which writers like Aimé Césaire have lucidly theorized.
