Book review: “Human Scale” by Lawrence Wright
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman
Like the universe, The Human Scale begins with a big bang. A terrorist bomb is discovered aboard a commercial flight about to depart Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport bound for JFK. Although the device is removed from the plane, it explodes while being disassembled, killing five security officers. A sixth, FBI agent Anthony Malik, survives, but, severely injured, he is forced to wear a black patch to cover the socket that used to hold his left eye. He vows to hunt down the murderer.
After a year of rehabilitation, Malik, who was born in Philadelphia and never knew much about his father, a Palestinian immigrant, decides to visit Hebron, for the wedding of a cousin he had never met. The ancient city is home to the Cave of Machpelah, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims where the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are said to be buried and where bloody intercommunal clashes have long occurred. When Jacob Weingarten, the local police chief, is beheaded by an unknown killer, Malik gets caught up in the violence and a web of secrets within secrets.
To local readers, Lawrence Wright, who lives in Austin, might be best known for the essays he contributed regularly to Texas Monthly, before joining the staff of The New Yorker. His most recent book, the 2023 novel Mr. Texas, sticks close to home, as does the nonfiction God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, published in 2018. However, he is no stranger to the Levant. Early in his career, he taught for two years at the American University in Cairo, and he did extensive research on terrorist networks in the Middle East for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2007.
In a fiction created with what he calls “a mix of compassion and anger,” Wright offers a comprehensive view of what Sara Ben-Gal, who has abandoned the burdens of the Jewish state to study in Paris, terms “the world capital of hatred.” Among Wright’s large cast of characters are Jewish fundamentalists and Muslim terrorists, as well as idealists who yearn for harmonious coexistence between two kindred peoples. Sara’s stubborn father, Yossi Ben-Gal, insists on maintaining his identity as an Israeli Jew who scorns religious fanaticism as “magnified superstition, used mainly as an excuse for savagery.” After Weingarten’s death, Yossi takes over as chief of police, pursuing justice even when the lines between right and wrong are murky and even when it puts him into conflict with both Shin Bet and Hamas. Nothing is what it seems in a world rife with clandestine collaborators, and drug dealers. The Israeli cop and the Palestinian American G-man form an odd alliance in pursuit of the truth.
Wright’s journalistic skills are evident in the specificity of street names, firearms, and foods. The accounts of how a butcher slices up a lamb and a sapper dismantles a device fortified with TATP (aka “mother of Satan”) seem authentic. But sometimes the researcher’s hand is a bit obtrusive, as when tefillin are glossed as “small black boxes containing biblical verses” and the Mishnah is said, imprecisely, to be “a collection of ancient Jewish traditions.” This is a didactic novel, written to make its reader knowledgeable about the history of the Middle East. When Malik with his eye patch is likened to Moshe Dayan, a digression fills us in on Dayan’s life, and the story is also interrupted to explain the holiday of Purim. When, pointing to the nearby Mount of Olives, the head of Shin Bet tells a subordinate: “The Christians say it is where Jesus ascended into heaven,” the reader, like the subordinate, already knows.
But The Human Scale is primarily a thriller, with enough violent action as it rides cycles of vengeance to merit an extra box of popcorn. Each chapter begins with a dateline. The one in which Malik checks in at the Abu Mazen Hotel begins: “Hebron, Sept. 25, 2023.” Any minimally informed reader knows that each subsequent chapter brings us closer and closer to October 7, 2023 and the atrocities unleashed by Hamas from Gaza. Ripped from the headlines, this is a ripping good story about a fractured world we cannot ignore.
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The Human Scale by Lawrence Wright; Alfred A. Knopf; 2025; $30.00.