Scattered Like Seeds: A Novel [Hardcover]

Shaw J. Dallal (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It is 1972 when Thafer Allam, a Palestinian-American lawyer and nuclear engineer seeks to navigate family, international politics and ethnic propaganda in a return to the Middle East after more than 20 years in the States. Allam left war-torn Jerusalem, his birthplace, in 1951 to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he has since built a law practice and a family. But following the death of his American wife, he is offered a position in Kuwait as counsel to the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). Longing to reconnect with his family and explore his roots, he seizes the opportunity to go back home. Others, however, suspect Allam's motives: they think he has returned to fight the Israelis, the way his father fought to drive the British out of Palestine in the 1930s. The political talk is fraught with the question of Palestine sovereignty, and Allam strives to temper the ethnic bigotry displayed?while not ignoring the anguish suffered?by both sides, Israeli and Arab. The complexity of this persistent conflict saps energy from such sketchily drawn subplots as the budding romance between Thafer and Suhaila, an Arab widow who would like to marry Thafer but is determined to stay in the Middle East. Two of Thafer's four children come to live with him in Kuwait; this development, and the vigor with which these American children take up the Arab cause, is not convincingly crystallized. Dallal packs much historical material into this debut novel, which does not commit itself exclusively to either history, politics, memoir or fiction but stands separately as an enigmatic voice speaking on a most difficult topic.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 335 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd); 1st edition (December 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815605536
• ISBN-13: 978-0815605539
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revelations from the Other Side, November 25, 1999

By 

Stephen Infantino (Libertyville, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scattered Like Seeds: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Scattered Like Seeds" is a touching and moving historical novel of a successful Palestinian- American lawyer whose heart is torn between love for his native land of Palestine and his adopted land, the United States. Any first- or second- generation American with feeling for his or her own roots will identify with Thafer Allam as he returns to the Middle East to become Chief Consul for the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). This book will appeal alike to lovers of human interest stories and history. Using Daniel C. Dillers's "The Middle East", Simha Flapan's "The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities", and Mohamed Heikel's "The Road to Ramadan" as sources, the book presents the little- known Arab side of the 1973 war and oil embargo.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching portrayal of an immigrant 's experience, December 27, 2001

By 

Maria Coppola Bettua (Syracuse, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scattered Like Seeds: A Novel (Hardcover)

While it provides an easy and enjoyable read, Scattered Like Seeds is, at the same time, a thought-provoking work replete with contradictions and lessons about the power of space and place.

This historical novel evokes two emerging themes based on contradictory relationships, namely the immigrant's attachment to both the native country and the adopted country and, more importantly, the post World War II displacement of people from their homeland and the associated combination of cultural tension and understanding that is epitomized by the main character, Thafer.

The author's skillfully depicted narrative also points to a sense of powerlessness and isolation that is at the core of a displaced people's existence-a cataclysmic experience that forever touches the Palestinian immigrant's identity as he grapples with emergent contradictions of human emotions -- love, respect and patriotism-through the insightful prism of history, geography and culture.

One would also add that this book is about very relationships--both professional and personal-- in an area of the world that has long been overlooked. The events of September 11, 2001 awakened us to a new reality. It is time to revert our attention and begin to garner knowledge of our shared collective human experience with the peoples of the Middle East. Toward that effort, this book would be a premier introduction. I recommend it highly for both the general readership and for the classroom. It is a first-rate text promoting cultural understanding and much needed discussion about the intricacies of our changing global community.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative, interesting and timely, especially now in 2001, November 6, 2001

By 

Constance Bryceland "CB" (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scattered Like Seeds: A Novel (Hardcover)

I picked up this book by chance and could not put it down. The author writes about the on-going strife between Israel and the Palestinians over the past several decades, always optimistic that sooner or later, they will resolve their issues and make peace. And reading this book right after the September 01 tragedies shows how his optimism was unfortunately incorrect. But I learned so much more about the region and the conflicts while enjoying a very human family drama at the same time.