October 21, 2025
Paul Buhle
Thus, the compendium quality of these writings alone would mark them as essential. You Can’t Please All—the second, and presumably final, volume fills 773 pages, and includes a personal chronology—offers potential readers a daunting text, to say the least. This is not a quick read or, for that matter, an easy one. Clearly, Ali has kept some notes.
Ali is from Pakistan, son of a leading newspaper editor. He arrived in the United Kingdom for school and never left—except to go everywhere, never losing his London base. As he explains in Street-Fighting Years, he excelled in debate from his early schooling onward, and, as the 1960s brought Britain’s nonwhite (who were, at that point, mostly immigrant) population to political importance or notoriety, he became the go-to guy. As early as his Oxford days, in student debates and public discussions that reached far beyond campus, this lean and handsome orator emerged as a public personality of note.
That he calls his memoir Street-Fighting Years also suggests, accurately, that he has brushed shoulders with entertainment lefties, from Mick Jagger, to some of the Redgrave siblings, to even John Lennon. He does not dwell on this point, but it is clear that public personalities—people sufficiently courageous to put their charisma to good use—could and did find him useful.
The ups and downs of these years reference, somewhat more than most U.S. audiences will expect, the history, complications, and contradictions of the British cerebral and cultural left. If the Labour Party leadership barely tolerated socialists under most circumstances, it always harbored varieties of radicals who yearned for more. The newer generations of activists thus found supporters, sometimes in high places. Perhaps the historic, smashing victory of Margaret Thatcher over striking coal miners prompted many to seek change through cultural struggle. Alternatively, it may have been the example set by individual outstanding writers, actors, and film directors, notably Ken Loach, that showed the new generation what they could do.
Versions of eclectic left-wing ideas could be found within a range of British popular entertainment of the 1970s through the ’90s and beyond: from films to theater, and from music to literature. Artists writing or acting in some BBC shows seem to have actually read Karl Marx, or at least popularizations of Marx, along with Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as a wide variety of texts. If the Trotskyist group that Ali actually joined, or at least considered himself allied with, had “under thirty” members, their favorite savant was Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the master of Trotskyist ideas known almost as widely as the more heretical Isaac Deutscher.
British Trotskyists made themselves active in the labor movement but more often in the social movements, such as Rock Against Racism, that they influenced. By way of contrast, the left also included mainline Communists such as the aging trade union leader, beloved for leadership over decades of service, rather than for a lingering Russian fondness; the peacenik who worked the urban districts door-to-door for an upcoming rally; the faithful poll worker of the Labour Left; or the activist of the Caribbean-British left or elsewhere in the faded British empire, increasingly numerous with the tide of immigration—not to mention the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Left activists. Ali’s world more likely included a disproportionate number of those with upper-level educations, but he mixed heartily with all on the socioeconomic spectrum.
No historian of the British left is likely to ignore its fractious character. Splits and splits of splits reflected disappointments in what might be called non-breakthroughs. The always lively debate of ideas generally led to groups—even and sometimes especially the competing Trotskyist groups—denouncing each other for their ideas and personalities alike. Street-Fighting Years has some highly personal reminiscences that are certain to be puzzling to some outsiders, but to many readers, amusing and reminiscent.
The greatest influence of British Trotskyists and the groups around them might be measured in the tabloid that Ali and his often-changing comrades published: The Black Dwarf. It had more intellectual depth than most of its U.S. equivalents, although fewer “underground” comics and surely less counterculture. It was a serious, if mostly goodhearted, publication. One of its principal writers, Sheila Rowbotham, was an intellectual giant of the then-rising women’s movement and its history. This counted: rather suddenly, women’s history seemed very real and more important than anyone, within or outside of the left, had given credit. The Red Mole (1970–1973), published by the International Marxist Group, with Ali on its editorial board, was officially a Trotskyist paper, rather than the product of a coalition. Nevertheless, it was pretty wide open and was attached to the women’s movement. It thus meant a lot more than most of the British Old Left could have anticipated.
The Old Left personalities, like the New Left personalities in You Can’t Please All, are described with great sensitivity and real insight. As a journalist at work when he had the time and opportunity, Ali has a genius for the affable approach to the perceived personalities, especially, if not only, to those whom he admires and befriends. In his manner of storytelling around incidents in British and far-away parts, they come off as interesting, important for a moment or longer (mostly far from the United Kingdom), but always distinct, and not as “types” to be understood in political terms only. He does little with his half-dozen years guiding the BBC talk show Bandung File, but here the conversation about the Global South illuminated large districts to an audience willing to watch and learn.
You Can’t Please All, Ali tells us, could have been divided into two, but at 80 years old, he seems to have a wish to wrap things up. As he suggests, it is a farrago of sorts: with letters, poems, occasional song lyrics, and, above all, anecdotes. He has left organized Trotskyism behind, and, if he does rejoin the Labour Party to which he had never, as a radical youth, been much devoted, his heart does not seem to be in it. The prospects for its leftish second layer of leadership remain always iffy; the “parliamentary road to socialism,” as in the old jest, is almost invisible and mostly untrodden. The road to respectability, to being elected to office and holding office, has always proved far too tempting. The era of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership turns out to be an outlier, and the day-to-day behavior of office holders, whether Labour or Tory, is famously similar, their staffs desperately seeking to control the news and shift sympathies in a favorable direction. If less so in the Thatcher years, when clear lines emerged on the right, it is more so afterward—apart from the Corbyn exception. Instead, it represents a return to an abysmal political normalcy.
But the main interest of this gigantic volume rests on other grounds. British readers will relish all the discussion of left-wing journalism, in or out of mainstream and distinctly left publications. Ever out of power, the journalists are a kind of politics themselves, in the tradition of British (mostly English) literary and social criticism going back to the eighteenth century. He knows them all, at least all on the left, and we get repeated glimpses of the scene as the decades pass. The New Left Review itself, despite some wobbling, stands firm, its leading editors and some of its intimate contributors (notably the American Mike Davis, and, at a greater distance, Fredric Jameson) on the job of reporting, analyzing, and offering up cultural perspectives.
Ali traveled widely and has priceless insights based on conversations and meetings, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, more occasionally Asia, Africa, and Monroe Doctrine territory—the Caribbean through South America. Especially notable is his “Havana Diary,” which muses on the complexities of the revolutionary regime’s survival less than a hundred miles from U.S. shores, and Ali’s firsthand accounts of Bolivarianism and its architect, Hugo Chávez. He devotes an entire chapter to the Salvador Allende regime. Like others with contacts, he has known emerging leaders including in his travels to Chile in a revolutionary moment (or not long after). His further travels often cover situations hopelessly lost to revolutionary struggles, at least for the current period. He describes settings and personalities with the eye of a novelist—perhaps a novelist of the later nineteenth century, like the Russian writers who inspired the emerging left-wing Yiddish literature of the 1890s.
Readers will also find much of interest in Ali’s account of developments in Pakistan. Here he is on home territory. However repetitive their dilemmas, generation after generation, leftish nationalists seek to support the Palestinians, oppose the U.S. State Department, and even tackle the staggering corruption of the ruling elite. He knows them all, and his insights are indisputable.
However, it is on Russia, and the last stages of the attempts to revive the hopes of 1917, that may be the most telling and agonizing pages of You Can’t Please All. Over grand dinners and intimate settings, from Moscow to the eastern republics, he meets to discuss the range of interests that today’s readers will surely wish to revisit, drawing their own conclusions from Ali’s. His old and new friends know where the bodies are buried.
One section goes to the survivors of Joseph Stalin’s Purges. The banning of V. I. Lenin’s early, and some later, works on Stalin’s order makes Lenin the truth-teller most severely repressed, even with Lenin portraits and statuettes everywhere. This “Unknown Lenin,” only now becoming known, read, and discussed, along with the writings of Western (and other) left-wing journalists, novelists, and theoreticians were unavailable, as good as banned, until at least the 1970s—that is, outside of the private libraries of people with some influence.
Ecologists have learned, in recent decades, how their Russian counterparts sought to use the power of the state to save ecoregions, and, in doing so, renew the hopes of scientists in the new Communist state before Stalinism decreed a ruthless march toward industrialization. Trotskyists such as C. L. R. James (who makes brief appearances in these pages, particularly in the first volume) likewise pointed to the factory-floor power of Russian workers disappearing during the 1930s, anticipating the bureaucratic takeover of the new and once-notoriously militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions.
Revival of something like a socialistic democracy in the Soviet Union, a real social transformation, seemed eminently (and perhaps imminently) possible during the 1980s. Those who had held on for decades, quietly awaiting this moment, held their breath. Then, as Ali explains, Mikhail Gorbachev was all too easily duped by Ronald Reagan’s State Department, followed by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. NATO was never going to stop at any agreed-to point, and U.S. economic pressure would inevitably push Russia toward “shock therapy,” stealing the resources of possible socialist revival. Yet, reading Ali’s stories of various meetings, one imagines other outcomes.
On the British home front, we inevitably find Corbyn. For a moment, Ali finds hope in the Labour Party. Corbyn’s domestic programs seemed modest, much in line with an assortment of liberal thinkers around the United States and Europe—Keir Starmer actually accepted much of the same framework, but in gaining office, swung sharply rightward—but Corbyn’s global vision went far beyond Labour traditions. His embrace of solidarity rather than war matched those of a whole range of foreign policy specialists, including Andrew Bacevich in the United States. Never mind all that: the hawks, in the true tradition of an AFL-CIO tail wagging behind the U.S. State Department, in this case joined by the Israel lobby, sprung to the attack. Corbyn would be expelled, along with famed filmmaker Loach, and hundreds of others.
Ali’s chapter on Corbyn can be linked to another, called “The Case Against Tony Blair,” because the trajectory of New Labour thirty years earlier went in much the same direction, from proclaiming a new day for Labour to the embrace of Clinton and Clintonism. The BBC jumped on the war bandwagon, along with NPR and PBS, eager for a U.S. assault on Iraq, anticipating “candy and roses” to be thrown at U.S. soldiers by grateful Iraqi crowds. The Labour Left, never recovering from its crushing defeat by Thatcher in the 1980s, yielded timidly to Blair, who seemed to enjoy the unanimous approval of the British press. Blair did have something new, or, rather, unknown for a century and a half in British politics: the Muscular Christianity of the proud conqueror. Eventually, his lies about Iraq finally brought him down. His comeback plan must have anticipated a future Starmer.
A long and delicious section of You Can’t Please All involves Ali’s own family, described as a native aristocracy long in decay. A murderous internecine feud in the 1840s had led to a continuing conflict over property, with Ali’s own parents retaining considerable holdings. His mother, a rebellious proto-nationalist, married his father, a near-communist and a “senior cousin,” and they faced a changing world together. A fascinating photo digs one generation further back, showing Ali’s grandfather together with Winston Churchill and a British field marshal in 1942. Had the grandfather not died that year but lived on for a decade, Ali writes, he would have found himself, a long-time Communist sympathizer, under a Pakistani dictator trained at Sandhurst, the British military academy—and essentially working for the Americans, the new masters. This is a national tragedy that is also a family tragedy. Ali does not discuss the three novels he wrote dramatizing his family saga; there is too much else to cover.
He devotes two short essays in You Can’t Please All to Edward Said, a giant whom I knew at close range, if briefly (we shared a devotion to James). In the first essay, he returns to an interview with Said as he marks the occasion of Said’s death. In the second, ironically titled “I’m Glad Edward Said Is Dead,” he recalls very briefly the phrase used by famed liberal Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, who urgently wanted peace but shunned anti-Zionists of even the most sympathetic—even, or especially, Jewish—variety. Said was outside the boundaries of respectability, and Ali was in solidarity with him.
The final essay in You Can’t Please All, “The Ashes of Gaza,” seeks to embrace but also to get beyond the mourning of horrors. The “long twentieth century” proposed and explored by Eric Hobsbawm seems now longer and longer, extending to our own time. The greatest problems of society appear no easier to resolve, and the horrors are growing. Ali takes special note of once-promising Palestinian intellectuals, still young when fingered for assassination by Mossad. He celebrates the resolve of Palestinians to struggle all the way to freedom: misled, martyred, but somehow undefeated.
You Can’t Please All ends with a chronology that is as pleasing as the many pages of photos. There are few photos of Ali himself, but many of those whom he met, engaged with, and sometimes managed himself to snap.
Ali seems to have been everywhere for us. The reader can join him across all these pages, edified and enjoying the big journey.
Paul Buhle
Tariq Ali, Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
(London and New York: Verso, 2024, 3rd edition), 416 pages, paperback, $29.95;
Tariq Ali, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980–2024 (London and New York: Verso,
2024), 814 pages, hardback, $44.95.
Tariq Ali has been there. Basing
himself in Britain, Ali has traveled through every leftist event and met every
leftist personality for the last sixty years. No, not really, but I do not know
of anyone else who could come as close to this improbable claim (which he does
not make).
Thus, the compendium quality of these writings alone would mark them as essential. You Can’t Please All—the second, and presumably final, volume fills 773 pages, and includes a personal chronology—offers potential readers a daunting text, to say the least. This is not a quick read or, for that matter, an easy one. Clearly, Ali has kept some notes.
Ali is from Pakistan, son of a leading newspaper editor. He arrived in the United Kingdom for school and never left—except to go everywhere, never losing his London base. As he explains in Street-Fighting Years, he excelled in debate from his early schooling onward, and, as the 1960s brought Britain’s nonwhite (who were, at that point, mostly immigrant) population to political importance or notoriety, he became the go-to guy. As early as his Oxford days, in student debates and public discussions that reached far beyond campus, this lean and handsome orator emerged as a public personality of note.
That he calls his memoir Street-Fighting Years also suggests, accurately, that he has brushed shoulders with entertainment lefties, from Mick Jagger, to some of the Redgrave siblings, to even John Lennon. He does not dwell on this point, but it is clear that public personalities—people sufficiently courageous to put their charisma to good use—could and did find him useful.
The ups and downs of these years reference, somewhat more than most U.S. audiences will expect, the history, complications, and contradictions of the British cerebral and cultural left. If the Labour Party leadership barely tolerated socialists under most circumstances, it always harbored varieties of radicals who yearned for more. The newer generations of activists thus found supporters, sometimes in high places. Perhaps the historic, smashing victory of Margaret Thatcher over striking coal miners prompted many to seek change through cultural struggle. Alternatively, it may have been the example set by individual outstanding writers, actors, and film directors, notably Ken Loach, that showed the new generation what they could do.
Versions of eclectic left-wing ideas could be found within a range of British popular entertainment of the 1970s through the ’90s and beyond: from films to theater, and from music to literature. Artists writing or acting in some BBC shows seem to have actually read Karl Marx, or at least popularizations of Marx, along with Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as a wide variety of texts. If the Trotskyist group that Ali actually joined, or at least considered himself allied with, had “under thirty” members, their favorite savant was Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the master of Trotskyist ideas known almost as widely as the more heretical Isaac Deutscher.
British Trotskyists made themselves active in the labor movement but more often in the social movements, such as Rock Against Racism, that they influenced. By way of contrast, the left also included mainline Communists such as the aging trade union leader, beloved for leadership over decades of service, rather than for a lingering Russian fondness; the peacenik who worked the urban districts door-to-door for an upcoming rally; the faithful poll worker of the Labour Left; or the activist of the Caribbean-British left or elsewhere in the faded British empire, increasingly numerous with the tide of immigration—not to mention the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Left activists. Ali’s world more likely included a disproportionate number of those with upper-level educations, but he mixed heartily with all on the socioeconomic spectrum.
No historian of the British left is likely to ignore its fractious character. Splits and splits of splits reflected disappointments in what might be called non-breakthroughs. The always lively debate of ideas generally led to groups—even and sometimes especially the competing Trotskyist groups—denouncing each other for their ideas and personalities alike. Street-Fighting Years has some highly personal reminiscences that are certain to be puzzling to some outsiders, but to many readers, amusing and reminiscent.
The greatest influence of British Trotskyists and the groups around them might be measured in the tabloid that Ali and his often-changing comrades published: The Black Dwarf. It had more intellectual depth than most of its U.S. equivalents, although fewer “underground” comics and surely less counterculture. It was a serious, if mostly goodhearted, publication. One of its principal writers, Sheila Rowbotham, was an intellectual giant of the then-rising women’s movement and its history. This counted: rather suddenly, women’s history seemed very real and more important than anyone, within or outside of the left, had given credit. The Red Mole (1970–1973), published by the International Marxist Group, with Ali on its editorial board, was officially a Trotskyist paper, rather than the product of a coalition. Nevertheless, it was pretty wide open and was attached to the women’s movement. It thus meant a lot more than most of the British Old Left could have anticipated.
The Old Left personalities, like the New Left personalities in You Can’t Please All, are described with great sensitivity and real insight. As a journalist at work when he had the time and opportunity, Ali has a genius for the affable approach to the perceived personalities, especially, if not only, to those whom he admires and befriends. In his manner of storytelling around incidents in British and far-away parts, they come off as interesting, important for a moment or longer (mostly far from the United Kingdom), but always distinct, and not as “types” to be understood in political terms only. He does little with his half-dozen years guiding the BBC talk show Bandung File, but here the conversation about the Global South illuminated large districts to an audience willing to watch and learn.
You Can’t Please All, Ali tells us, could have been divided into two, but at 80 years old, he seems to have a wish to wrap things up. As he suggests, it is a farrago of sorts: with letters, poems, occasional song lyrics, and, above all, anecdotes. He has left organized Trotskyism behind, and, if he does rejoin the Labour Party to which he had never, as a radical youth, been much devoted, his heart does not seem to be in it. The prospects for its leftish second layer of leadership remain always iffy; the “parliamentary road to socialism,” as in the old jest, is almost invisible and mostly untrodden. The road to respectability, to being elected to office and holding office, has always proved far too tempting. The era of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership turns out to be an outlier, and the day-to-day behavior of office holders, whether Labour or Tory, is famously similar, their staffs desperately seeking to control the news and shift sympathies in a favorable direction. If less so in the Thatcher years, when clear lines emerged on the right, it is more so afterward—apart from the Corbyn exception. Instead, it represents a return to an abysmal political normalcy.
But the main interest of this gigantic volume rests on other grounds. British readers will relish all the discussion of left-wing journalism, in or out of mainstream and distinctly left publications. Ever out of power, the journalists are a kind of politics themselves, in the tradition of British (mostly English) literary and social criticism going back to the eighteenth century. He knows them all, at least all on the left, and we get repeated glimpses of the scene as the decades pass. The New Left Review itself, despite some wobbling, stands firm, its leading editors and some of its intimate contributors (notably the American Mike Davis, and, at a greater distance, Fredric Jameson) on the job of reporting, analyzing, and offering up cultural perspectives.
Ali traveled widely and has priceless insights based on conversations and meetings, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, more occasionally Asia, Africa, and Monroe Doctrine territory—the Caribbean through South America. Especially notable is his “Havana Diary,” which muses on the complexities of the revolutionary regime’s survival less than a hundred miles from U.S. shores, and Ali’s firsthand accounts of Bolivarianism and its architect, Hugo Chávez. He devotes an entire chapter to the Salvador Allende regime. Like others with contacts, he has known emerging leaders including in his travels to Chile in a revolutionary moment (or not long after). His further travels often cover situations hopelessly lost to revolutionary struggles, at least for the current period. He describes settings and personalities with the eye of a novelist—perhaps a novelist of the later nineteenth century, like the Russian writers who inspired the emerging left-wing Yiddish literature of the 1890s.
Readers will also find much of interest in Ali’s account of developments in Pakistan. Here he is on home territory. However repetitive their dilemmas, generation after generation, leftish nationalists seek to support the Palestinians, oppose the U.S. State Department, and even tackle the staggering corruption of the ruling elite. He knows them all, and his insights are indisputable.
However, it is on Russia, and the last stages of the attempts to revive the hopes of 1917, that may be the most telling and agonizing pages of You Can’t Please All. Over grand dinners and intimate settings, from Moscow to the eastern republics, he meets to discuss the range of interests that today’s readers will surely wish to revisit, drawing their own conclusions from Ali’s. His old and new friends know where the bodies are buried.
One section goes to the survivors of Joseph Stalin’s Purges. The banning of V. I. Lenin’s early, and some later, works on Stalin’s order makes Lenin the truth-teller most severely repressed, even with Lenin portraits and statuettes everywhere. This “Unknown Lenin,” only now becoming known, read, and discussed, along with the writings of Western (and other) left-wing journalists, novelists, and theoreticians were unavailable, as good as banned, until at least the 1970s—that is, outside of the private libraries of people with some influence.
Ecologists have learned, in recent decades, how their Russian counterparts sought to use the power of the state to save ecoregions, and, in doing so, renew the hopes of scientists in the new Communist state before Stalinism decreed a ruthless march toward industrialization. Trotskyists such as C. L. R. James (who makes brief appearances in these pages, particularly in the first volume) likewise pointed to the factory-floor power of Russian workers disappearing during the 1930s, anticipating the bureaucratic takeover of the new and once-notoriously militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions.
Revival of something like a socialistic democracy in the Soviet Union, a real social transformation, seemed eminently (and perhaps imminently) possible during the 1980s. Those who had held on for decades, quietly awaiting this moment, held their breath. Then, as Ali explains, Mikhail Gorbachev was all too easily duped by Ronald Reagan’s State Department, followed by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. NATO was never going to stop at any agreed-to point, and U.S. economic pressure would inevitably push Russia toward “shock therapy,” stealing the resources of possible socialist revival. Yet, reading Ali’s stories of various meetings, one imagines other outcomes.
On the British home front, we inevitably find Corbyn. For a moment, Ali finds hope in the Labour Party. Corbyn’s domestic programs seemed modest, much in line with an assortment of liberal thinkers around the United States and Europe—Keir Starmer actually accepted much of the same framework, but in gaining office, swung sharply rightward—but Corbyn’s global vision went far beyond Labour traditions. His embrace of solidarity rather than war matched those of a whole range of foreign policy specialists, including Andrew Bacevich in the United States. Never mind all that: the hawks, in the true tradition of an AFL-CIO tail wagging behind the U.S. State Department, in this case joined by the Israel lobby, sprung to the attack. Corbyn would be expelled, along with famed filmmaker Loach, and hundreds of others.
Ali’s chapter on Corbyn can be linked to another, called “The Case Against Tony Blair,” because the trajectory of New Labour thirty years earlier went in much the same direction, from proclaiming a new day for Labour to the embrace of Clinton and Clintonism. The BBC jumped on the war bandwagon, along with NPR and PBS, eager for a U.S. assault on Iraq, anticipating “candy and roses” to be thrown at U.S. soldiers by grateful Iraqi crowds. The Labour Left, never recovering from its crushing defeat by Thatcher in the 1980s, yielded timidly to Blair, who seemed to enjoy the unanimous approval of the British press. Blair did have something new, or, rather, unknown for a century and a half in British politics: the Muscular Christianity of the proud conqueror. Eventually, his lies about Iraq finally brought him down. His comeback plan must have anticipated a future Starmer.
A long and delicious section of You Can’t Please All involves Ali’s own family, described as a native aristocracy long in decay. A murderous internecine feud in the 1840s had led to a continuing conflict over property, with Ali’s own parents retaining considerable holdings. His mother, a rebellious proto-nationalist, married his father, a near-communist and a “senior cousin,” and they faced a changing world together. A fascinating photo digs one generation further back, showing Ali’s grandfather together with Winston Churchill and a British field marshal in 1942. Had the grandfather not died that year but lived on for a decade, Ali writes, he would have found himself, a long-time Communist sympathizer, under a Pakistani dictator trained at Sandhurst, the British military academy—and essentially working for the Americans, the new masters. This is a national tragedy that is also a family tragedy. Ali does not discuss the three novels he wrote dramatizing his family saga; there is too much else to cover.
He devotes two short essays in You Can’t Please All to Edward Said, a giant whom I knew at close range, if briefly (we shared a devotion to James). In the first essay, he returns to an interview with Said as he marks the occasion of Said’s death. In the second, ironically titled “I’m Glad Edward Said Is Dead,” he recalls very briefly the phrase used by famed liberal Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, who urgently wanted peace but shunned anti-Zionists of even the most sympathetic—even, or especially, Jewish—variety. Said was outside the boundaries of respectability, and Ali was in solidarity with him.
The final essay in You Can’t Please All, “The Ashes of Gaza,” seeks to embrace but also to get beyond the mourning of horrors. The “long twentieth century” proposed and explored by Eric Hobsbawm seems now longer and longer, extending to our own time. The greatest problems of society appear no easier to resolve, and the horrors are growing. Ali takes special note of once-promising Palestinian intellectuals, still young when fingered for assassination by Mossad. He celebrates the resolve of Palestinians to struggle all the way to freedom: misled, martyred, but somehow undefeated.
You Can’t Please All ends with a chronology that is as pleasing as the many pages of photos. There are few photos of Ali himself, but many of those whom he met, engaged with, and sometimes managed himself to snap.
Ali seems to have been everywhere for us. The reader can join him across all these pages, edified and enjoying the big journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment