THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, it seems to be drawing to a close

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR
GIULIANO DA EMPOLI (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling assessment of international politics in our time, from an internationally bestselling author whose work has sparked controversy and debate across the world

Blending the author’s personal insight with startling historical comparisons to the days of Machiavelli and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, The Hour of the Predator describes the growing influence of tech billionaires, the rise of autocratic regimes and the erosion of traditional diplomacy, to paint a chilling picture of a disintegrating world order.

Giuliano Da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator is a timely and incisive examination of the shifting power dynamics in global politics, where traditional governments find themselves increasingly outmatched by technology tycoons and autocratic geopolitical predators who shape the world through brute force, deception, and disruption.

Drawing on his experience as a political advisor to a former Italian Prime Minister, Da Empoli takes the reader on an eye-opening journey around the international political circuit—from New York to Riyadh, and from the United Nations to Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton— and through the looking glass to a world of ruthless power struggles, where the tech lords already seem to inhabit another world and AI is already out of control.

The Hour of the Predator is the latest book from the internationally bestselling author of The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has been translated into thirty-five languages and is now being adapted for a major movie by Olivier Assayas.

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My Review: Author da Empoli states a truth we're all familiar with succinctly: "All the guardrails of the old world—the respect for the independence of certain institutions, human and minority rights, a concern for international repercussions—have no value now that the hour of the predator is upon us." This has been true for forty-plus years, starting with the election interference that installed Ronald Reagan in office in 1981 and ushered in the most efficient, nost rapacious looting of the US national treasure by the greediest scum on the planet.

It is now a beautiful moment in our cultural history. The US Congress is, at last, returning to the control of the president's political enemies so will be able to function as Congress again. The greedy scum that's risen to the top has finally made we-the-people suffer privations bad enough to deliver "Them" a ringing rebuke: "Enough."

Author da Empoli has crystallized a large portion of the reasons why in this book. The Cold War gave the greediest capitalists and other grifters an extremely useful straw man to wave in the hoi polloi's faces as they steadily set the stage for their revolution of greed. When the straw fell out slightly before the stage directions were fully drafted, "They" were forced to share the benefits of peace "They" had not planned on ever occurring while scrambling for another way to keep accumulating more. More what? Whatever. Just MORE. Money, power, toys, MORE.

There is no satiating this greed. The story of "Golden Age" Spain in these pages is vivid proof of that. The wildly misinterpreted guidebooks for greed by Baltasar Gracián, for conquest and dominion by Machiavelli, became morally celebrated by many bad-faith actors over the centuries. Always, always ending in the practicioners steadily growing more and more incompetent at exercising the (wrong) lessons they learned from these misinterpretations.

Our present moment is seeing the collapse of kakistocracy across the globe: Hungary rejecting Orban. deeply admired by felonious yam, was the one that stunned me the most. Macron is in a lot of trouble for trying to take things away from the French that they do not want to lose; and his mistake? The only reason for this is to make the banksters richer. Our Gross Old Pedophiles did better for decades by promising they were fighting the insiders who make we-the-people poorer by loading up their wallets with taxes not dollars. The illusion popped when diesel hit $8 a gallon because the war felonious yam and his stooge Kegsbreath the TV presenter who wanted to cosplay soldiers catastrophically failed to do what their boardgame view of the world wanted.

Reading Author da Empoli's refreshingly snarky and irreverent words in this moment of unbelievable possibility is an excellent way to solidify the startling fragility of "Their" power. Elon Musk alone spent close to HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to get the Gross Old Pedophiles party's candidates elected. He lost all those races with "Them" because money = speech = influence only works on docile people.

I am neverendingly astonished at "Their" inability to see why FDR should be "Their" God: his reforms quieted the socialist revolution well underway and that would've taken a lot more from "Them" that actually, by right of conquest, was defensibly theirs. Whatever else one can say about elite education, it has signally failed to teach any one of its graduates the importance of making concessions to get long-term buy-in to an inherently unfair system. "They" are once again on the precipice of losing the war because "They" don't see the point of strategic retreat that can be sold as "Their" loss to appease, re-docilify, us.

I'm glad. We-the-people need to win the war this time.

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, food for deep thinking before you yell at the new Congress

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It
SAMUEL MILLER McDONALD
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’—existence on a planet in crisis.

In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

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My Review: Progress is like success, or victory: what exactly do you mean by that? Progress is responsible for all the good things we, the richest country in the richest civilization the planet has ever seen, have right now. I don't know that I agree with that assertion, but I know that it or its twin underpins assumptions about the way we perceive the world. What do people in the US talk about when they discuss "The Economy"? Wall Street indexes of "performance" and the pieces of that puzzle like meeting analysts' expectations, announcing restructurings of debts and offerings of shares...debts companies take on to finance progress and profits that will pay shareholders....

It's a casino, the croupiers at the roulette table of the exchange floor are analysts and brokers and other members of the casino staff who must all get paid, but only after the casino owners are given their majority of the funds. The way this money is created: Destruction. Extraction. Exploitation.

In no way does that represent "THE Economy." This book takes us through what the present systemic definitions of progress are, why they exist, what economic activity they promote and why on multiple axes. Then Author McDonald asks "...and why is it like this again?"

There is no one single model for how best to organize a society since what's best will depend on local ecologies and circumstances. The Anthropocene is likely to be an epoch of re-diversifying human cultures and societies even as coastlines shift, deserts expand and climate zones climb latitudes. What I am most concerned with is that the faulty relationship between human systems and ecological systems at the heart of the last 5,000 years. A relationship built on expansion and exploitation should be forever destroyed. Freedom from parasitism will ensure long-term survival of some sort.

Okay! Great!

How, exactly?

So no, this is not the teacher's edition with the answers in it. But considering how much time I spend thinking about this stuff and the pretty incoherent rant above is the best memory approximation I can come up with after reading and taking notes on this book, I'm going to say most all y'all could benefit mightily from the read. It will prepare us all for the intense, loud, really really rude arguments to come about that hydra in lamb's clothing that we unthinkingly call "The Economy." (Spoiler: there's more than one, and they do not follow the same rules! Oh fun!)

But y'all listen a minute. I bet anyone who reads my reviews is aware of how bad the economy is treating you and yours. The only way to know if some bloviating gasbag is lying to you to steal from you, like certain fat immigrant asswipes and some revoltingly orange pedophiles I needn't name, unless you have some information they did not give you to measure their ideas against, how will you ever be able to spot the con? No one wants to be duped. No one who knows enough to form questions to ask is sure as shootin' to fall for it.

Read before you think, think before you agree with anyone. #ReadingIsResistance

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice...chilling, informative stories

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice
NATALIE LIVINGSTONE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The most famous trial of the twentieth century—told through the eyes of the women history forgot.

In November 1945, the world turned its gaze to Nuremberg. Inside a courtroom built by and for men, justice was being sought for crimes almost beyond comprehension. The spotlight fell on Nazi leaders, Allied prosecutors and military judges—but in the shadows, women were recording, interpreting, witnessing, painting, testifying. Yet their names were often missing from the headlines. Eighty years on, this book finally returns them to the centre of the story.

The Nuremberg Women follows eight extraordinary a young Soviet interpreter balancing political survival with truth-telling; a British painter capturing justice in oils; a French resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz to confront her persecutors; a Hungarian countess hosting both Nazis and survivors in a single house. Alongside them stand the sharpest literary minds of the day—Erika Mann, Rebecca West and others—each wielding the pen as a tool of reckoning.

Far from the official narrative, Natalie Livingstone reveals a trial that was more intimate, chaotic and human than history has allowed. It was a place of intense love affairs and political tensions, of personal reckonings and the first tremors of the Cold War. These women, often dismissed or sidelined, shaped how the trial unfolded—and how it was remembered.

This is Nuremberg as you've never seen not only a reckoning with the horrors of war, but a story of erasure, courage and transformation. The women's voices—once silenced—now ring out with clarity, offering a powerful new vision of the past, and of justice itself.

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My Review: The story of Erika Mann, the reporter and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, was excerpted by LitHub this week. I link it here because it is a big ask to recommend a book about the Nuremberg Trials to y'all when the US readership is most likely in a celebratory mood. Erika Mann's story in this book is my lure to get you to see the

The stories of these women, eight of them, were not foregrounded at the time they were living them...kind of understandable, given what was happening in 1945 and 1946...but I'd only ever heard of two of them before, and we've had eighty years of endlessly rehashing their subjects' atrocities to be told this information about any of them. Rebecca West and Erika Mann are known to some to this day for their writing. Erika Mann, a lesbian and Red Scare victim, is much more well known in queer circles than among the cishet. Rebecca Weat, if you're reading this blog, needs no introduction. Her role in the reporting and the crafting of public opinion around the Nuremberg Trials is considerably less known or discussed at the least, even among people who fancy her writing.

The psychic toll on many of these selected women is well-represented by their fiendishly tough jobs...translating the defendants' words describing their crimes, catering to the mens' practical needs, the many and various ways they were required to treat monstrous people as ordinary when each had suffered to a greater or lesser degree from the evils they committed...it is impressive none of these women turned murderous vengeance-seeker. What is true of the defendants, that they were anti-semitic to the bone, was sadly true of most of the non-Jewish women in this story. While the main focus was on the Nazi bigwigs, there were witnesses to house and feed during the trials and they evoked different responses from these profiled women. Not all victims of crimes are saints and not a few are repulsive as people victims or no.

I enjoyed the reasonable tone Author Livingstone uses throughout the book. Where I would succumb to the inner prompting to say horrible things about the nastier cases, presenting their messy intimate lives with eagerly condemnatory insults, she is simply reporting (in more detail than I myownself wanted) the factual reality of the people unjustly ignored by history. "Warts and all" is more than just a nostrum peddled by biographers and memoirists to excuse spilling the tea on the dead. It reminds us that those who commit evil are, au fond, simply people; not good ones, but people; and so are the victims of evil.

It is important to make this information relatable, accessible to those of us living in a deeply polarized, deeply contentious world. Our comparatively recent past has great evildoers in it who worried about how their children were faring at the mercy of those who hate their parents. There were victims who hated other victims for their religion, and found sympathy for the perpetrators of crimes against those people, but not themselves of course.

Humans are complex beings with admixtures of admirable and awful traits. It will behoove all of us around the world to learn how our parents, grandparents faced the challenge of meting out justice even when they wanted revenge, and how many of those harmed were, by many people's lights, unworthhy of receiving justice because of their own turpitude.

It's also a thumping good read with lots of involving tales to tell.

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, more important today than ever

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
JOAN C. WILLIAMS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)―Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

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My Review: Wonk heaven. Like data? Want the sources more than the resources? Here's us a book.

"'The reason voters don't vote based on economics is that they absolutely don't believe that either Democrats or Republicans will ever deliver for them,' pollster David Mermin remarked to me in 2023." A key insight into the absolute weirdest phenomenon I know of, one that's bewildered me my entire adult life from Reagan robbing Social Security in the 1980s to felonious yam's announced before election tariff debacle. I think I get it now. Five decades-plus of betrayal and backstabbing in the service of making the rich into obscenely rich by both sides has led to the resigned certainty that no one in power cares a bit about your problems because they started stealing and hoarding long enough ago they're immune to your problems.

Add in the emasculation of working-class men, the rendering of their traditional work and work ethic unimportant and without value, and you get people ready to do anything they can to stick it to the bastards sticking it to them.

I get it. I feel it myself.

It's a situation better explained to me now. It was not a prose delight to read, but a careful academic explication (endnoted to a fare-thee-well) of what the data we have shows that is relevant to this question of why working-class political behavior is so out of sync with their actual best interests. Back someone into a corner and then start removing the floorboards they're standing on and you get irrational behavior.

3 November 2026 was a resounding rebuke of the worst offenders against the working class. Elon Musk spent $474 million...million...on the midterms and every candidae he backed lost, every measure he backed lost. The defeat of Proposition 40 in California was a typical Californians fooling themselves moment and, well, might be the most short-lived victory of the night. But a victory it was, and not for people who need the government to step up and do its job. In "winning" this victory, the fools with money handed already angry people a real, sharp-edged weapon to use against them. And if the winners of 3 November's blowouts don't hear from we-the-people that we *want* them to use that weapon, they will leave it sheathed, because it's scary to go against someone with piles of money and hate in his heart...but a bit less so now we've seen the real power of that money's limits. Remind the winners that reality does not only obey rich scumbags/tech oligarchs.

I think it's a big ask to say "read this book" in the midst of a celebratory mood about happy results for hard work done. I also know from ugly experience what happens when we-the-people walk away from a good night at the polls and go back to bed. Turn on your lamp, pick up a book about Society's problems, and read a chapter. Every night. We *all* need to start doing the work, thinking the hard problems through, and so discover the topics to focus attention on to include our fellow citizens more broadly.

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain, we need to be ready for the work to come

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."

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My Review: I really don't know how better to say what this collection reveals to the reader than: "...the future is not as it is so often spoken of—as a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging—but as a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don't) in the present.
... Hope is that recognition and a commitment to the pursuit of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created." And there it is.

What Author Solnit does is always to present the case there is hope in a world presented to us by our media of informing and advising us as ever more hopeless, ever darker, a hellscape...and we bu it then despair of it being fixable. Despair immobilizes you. Sit quiet, no TV/internet noise, and observe the people around you. In the moments of life in the majority of the world where they are, people are carrying on being fathers and mothers and teachers and firemen and everything beyond...there is reason for hope in that, there are not roving gangs of armed bandits in the streets of New York or Peoria or Dallas.

Unhook yourself from believing news is The Truth, instead of the curated opinions that create profits by engaging you in a doom spiral that it, by design, is. Author Solnit will focus your attention on what work needs doing, to fix or repair the very real issues, problems, and do it without ignoring or sugarcoating the real, serious issues...climate change, official corruption...that exist.

It's the US midterm election today. No matter what happens in these elections, tomorrow's work will still need doing on every front from every last one of us, political agnostics/refuseniks or not. Feeding the hungry, cleaning the streets, the waterways, all of it still needs doing whoever happens to be in power.

Reading this book will remind you of what, and why, it's necessary to give your planet and your world the help and effort it needs, and you can give.

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It, and why we need to make sure they don't again

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It
ELIE HONIG
HarperCollins
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exploration of America’s two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful— including, most notoriously, Donald Trump—manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds

How does he get away with it? That question, more than any other, vexes observers of, and participants in, the American criminal justice process. How do powerful people weaponize their wealth, political power, and fame to beat the system? And how can prosecutors fight back?

In Untouchable, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully evaded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn’t happen by accident.

In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how the system allows the powerful to become untouchable, takes us inside their heads, and offers solutions for making the system fairer and more honest, ensuring true justice for all—holding everyone, no matter their status, accountable for their criminal misdeeds.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: First, read this: "This is no defeatist eulogy for our justice system. This is, rather, a guide to navigate it. If we understand how bosses exploit systemic vulnerabilities, then we can meaningfully call upon the people who make the big decisions- primarily prosecutors- to fight back and pursue justice, no matter how daunting the challenge."

I'm sure every one of y'all can remember the Epstein Files by name. I'll wager far fewer can can summon a name or a picture of the figure(s) associated with the 2008 financial crash that very likely cost some of you a job, a home, your retirement savings; at the time all the focus was on people like Ben Bernanke and other high-minded banksters who switched to the government's side long enough to be sure there was no lasting damage to do it again when they changed sides back to banking. Because Epstein's name and his image dominate the perception of heinous crimes committed, there are zero other faces or names you're likely to put with the disgusting crime of trafficking young women to satisfy the Gross Old Pedophiles in their lustful desires' satisfaction...even if that meant dying for them. (Never happened, scream apologists and defenders, burying any mentions of a certain ranch in New Mexico tied to Epstein and its grisly murdered women's bodies. There's no coverage of investigation, their presence remains unexplained.)

Different crimes, same playbook. Distract attention, put a single face on crimes that harmed few in numbers and studiously work to keep faces out of sight when they could be attached to widespread harm. It's an old trick. The Mafia uses it, United Healthcare uses it, Paul Linebarger's post-Army intelligence life saw him publish Psychological Warfare in 1948, revised in 1954 (free Gutenberg download of that edition at the link), with many ideas for dirty tricks later developed into Mafia techniques. (Author Honig is an ex-prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and he was involved in prosecutions of dozens of Mafia members, including capos and other high-ranking members; he's literally seen it all.)

You know what caused me to shelve this book for a couple years lest I have more strokes? Look into the Supreme Court's 8-0 decision (in a case litigated by Jack Smith) from 2016 to exonerate convicted bribe-taking Virginia governor Bob McDonnell from his crimes because the bribes were not in themselves official acts.

A Supreme Court ruling determining that taking a bribe is not an official act so it's not punishable. We will hear A LOT MORE ABOUT THAT in the next few years.

I'm putting this review up on Tuesday, Election Day 2026, because no matter what happens we as a Body Politic need to be informed and ready to see through the time-tested tactics that allow the guilty to go unpunished, whether legally or by the public exercising their inalienable right to talk about whatever factual matter they care to discuss, whether in public or in private. It is time to make the world hotter for the people who, by words and (mis)deeds, too hot for us all to survive. Talk about facts: El Ni&ntil;o is biting, and climate change is making the naturally occurring event worse.

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, powerful alignment with anti-imperialism's historic chorus

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future
TAREQ BACONI
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

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My Review: A grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa who were forced out of their homes in 1948, Author Tareq has lived in a diaspora much like the Jews have done since Rome evicted them in the first century CE. It is foundational to his identity as he's lived in foreign places like Ammann, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. It might just be that these foreign cities would not feel like home for a young queer man, regardless of his family origins; but an out queer Palestinian can expect to be an outsider.

A lifetime spent Othered has made Author Tareq an activist to his bones. I suspect that would always have been his fate, but his need to usher justice into the conversation and into the world is the driver behind the decolonial jeremiad of this book. It is simply incredible that, as the English were being forced out of India, they were setting up a Zionist settler-colonial state in Palestine as part of the world's attempt to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust. Why they didn't simply hand over Austria and Bavaria to the Jews, and shoo the Germans out, I have never understood. Those were the cradles of Nazism. The Palestinians did nothing to aid the Holocaust that I've ever heard of...why punish them?

Ahem. Back to the book.

Given Islamic polities were generally more accepting of Jewish populations in their midst, there is no reason to imagine the cohabitation of Jewish and Palestinian Muslim would not have worked fine apart from the rise of the apartheid state post-1948. I think Author Tareq is on to something when he says the return of Palestine to its original people is the opening salvo of a second wave of decolonization, contra the United States' hegemonic control of the world's economies and militaries. The recent war on Iran, and its startling evidence of the loss of that hegemony, makes this the perfect time for readers on all sides of the political argument to read about how the idea of fairness and justice can re-enter the convesation.

I guarantee you, the US reader, will not like everything in this book. It is entirely sure that you won't agree with all his poposals...I didn't either. But all of us in the world need to know what all sides of the questions facing us in the world think, feel, want...and how they came to those ideas...as we decide how to steer the world with our votes, our money, our time and attention.

Starting here is painless. Author Tareq writes, and thinks, at a high level.