RaveThe NationAll of this can read like a chronicle of never-ending struggle ... But Khalidi’s book is also an act of historical recovery ... With more than 400 citations, The Hundred Years’ War is one of the best-researched general surveys of 20th and early 21st century Palestinian life, but it’s also a deeply personal work. To an outsider, Khalidi’s many references to his family’s experience may feel excessive, especially given that it was among the most prominent families in Palestine. But for a people whose history is all but criminalized, this act of retelling is itself a form of resistance, and to his credit, Khalidi takes pains to decry a patriarchal and centralized Palestinian leadership that persists to this day. While capturing the social history, Khalidi is careful not to lose sight of the realpolitik of movement building, showing how the most successful moments of Palestinian resistance occurred at those junctures where Israel’s interests came into tension with core Western ones.
Louise Erdrich
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is fiction, barely ... The chapters are short and often shift their setting and narrative perspective quickly to survey the book’s many characters. These cadences – the quick rise and fall and rise again – are typical of Erdrich ... Form mirrors content in The Night Watchman: from addiction to racism to sexual assault and land dispossession, the indignities of Native life pile up ... As she describes the attempts by the women of the jewel bearing plant to unionize, the use of community testimony to fight the \'emancipation\' bill, and other forms of learned communal resistance, Erdrich also resists descending into caricature. Her lives on the reservation are filled with the same loves, jealousies and insecurities that preoccupy us all. These are big stories about small places, and it is easy to feel lost in the mêlée of it all. But no sooner are we confronted with the enormous weight of this history than we are drawn back to the land and to its people, to Patrice on a train to Minneapolis, her head resting wearily on the glass by her window seat, watching the hills fly by.
