SOURCE: "From a Wellspring of Bitterness," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. 99, June 26, 1994, pp. 9-10.

In the following review, Shipler expresses mixed emotions for the themes of The Politics of Dispossession.

Quite some time ago, in what I believe was my only encounter with Edward W. Said, we compared notes on where we lived in Jerusalem—he as a Palestinian boy until 1947, I as a correspondent for The New York Times more than 30 years later. It turned out that both our homes were in the lovely, quiet neighborhood of Talbiya, an elegant quarter where well-to-do Arab families earlier in this century built houses with thick stone walls, now covered with flowering vines of bougainvillea. The places where Mr. Said and I lived were separated by a few blocks, a few decades, a few wars and the great divide of dispossession.

Talbiya's Arab residents began fleeing in...