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Travels with My Ottoman Uncle
by Raja Shehadeh
An engrossing family memoir that shines a light on Palestine's history, offering a wise, sobering view of how radically conditions there have changed since the late Ottoman Empire, from the award-winning author of
Raja Shehadeh's great-great-uncle Najib Nassar, a journalist born in 1865, spent the first 4 decades of his life under the Ottoman Empire. Ruled by a Muslim Sultan, the region nevertheless saw the coexistence of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and a freedom of movement unthinkable in the present-day Middle East. On a 2-year quest to discover Najib's fascinating story, Shehadeh follows his footsteps through what are now Lebanon and Israel, tracing the fall of the Empire after World War I and the disastrous British Mandate.
A family memoir written in luminescent prose, A Rift in Time also reflects on how Palestine—in particular the disputed Jordan Rift Valley—has been transformed. Most of Palestine's history and that of its people is buried deep in the ground: whole villages have disappeared, and names have been erased from the map. Yet by seeing the bigger picture of the landscape and the unending struggle for freedom as Shehadeh does, it is still possible to look toward a better future.
"A sorrowful, occasionally bitter disquisition on the loss of Palestinian agency." —Kirkus Reviews
"Mr. Shehadeh mourns a land lost. For [T.E.] Lawrence, Palestine was 'a collection of small irritating hills, crushed together pell-mell' but for Mr. Shehadeh, as in his prize-winning Palestinian Walks (2008), the landscape is his inspiration and solace, a history book waiting to be read. Almond trees mark Palestinian villages long gone, their drifts of white blossom gliding to the ground 'in utter, hushed silence'...Mr. Shehadeh's reverence for Palestine's land and history renders it holy anew." —The Economist (UK)
"Raja Shehadeh combines the passion of James Baldwin, the cool precision of Primo Levi, and the curiosity of that greatest of flâneurs, Walter Benjamin. An impassioned critic of the cruelty and oppression that remain the daily diet of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, a rueful observer of human vanities, an archaeologist of a Middle Eastern past that Zionism has sought to suppress, Shehadeh has compiled, book by book, with diligence and determination, an essential record of the Palestinian experience. But his books provide us with something far more nourishing, more reflective, more literary, than a mere record. They are the work of a defiant free spirit who, in spite of all the forces ranged against him, has lost neither his intellectual freedom nor his heart." —Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
This information about A Rift in Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and writer. He co-founded the award-winning Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq in 1979. In 2008, he won the Orwell Prize, a British award for political writing, for his book Palestinian Walks.
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