Maslin Watch: Talk About Your Coincidences

The posting of Maslin's review of Still Life With Bombers on the same day reports break of Israel's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin is the eeriest book-related synchronicity I've seen in the Times since September 11, 2001, when the Arts and Letters section ran a profile of Bill Ayers, a member of the Weathermen who'd set bombs at the Pentagon nearly thirty years earlier and not only didn't regret it, but said he felt he hadn't done enough.

David Horovitz (not to be confused with David Horowitz) has, in Maslin's estimation, has produced "an anatomy of an impasse [with] chilling efficacy." Praising his reportage, and quoting from it generously--but, hey, when you've got passages this vivid, you might as well use them, I suppose--she tends to summarize his conclusions rather than analyze them. Whether Horovitz is right or wrong in his assessment of Yassir Arafat, however, it seems that his consideration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be more timely.