In his new political thriller The Human Scale, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright tells the story of an Israeli cop and a Palestinian-American FBI agent who join forces to solve the murder of an Israeli police chief in the West Bank – set against the backdrop of the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict.
Wright joins us on WorldNow to discuss how his novel, which concludes on October 8th, 2023, underscores the human cost of this longstanding conflict. As he writes at the end of the book: “One cannot hope for an end to the strife without acknowledging the separate histories that each side claims.”
A staff writer at The New Yorker, Wright has spent decades reporting from the Middle East as a journalist, playwright, and novelist. He won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, his acclaimed nonfiction account of the rise of Al-Qaeda.
“The politics in this book are impossible to ignore; indeed, they’re the point. Wright is thorough in his recounting of key elements of the conflict.” – The New York Times
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Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
He is the author of eleven nonfiction books. His book about the rise of al-Qaeda, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread acclaim. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was made into a series for Hulu in 2018, starring Jeff Daniels, Alec Baldwin, and Tahar Rahim.
Wright has published four novels, “Noriega: God’s Favorite” (Simon and Schuster, 2000) which was made into a Showtime movie starring Bob Hoskins; “The End of October” (Knopf, 2020), a bestseller about a viral pandemic that came out right at the beginning of COVID; “Mr. Texas” (Knopf, 2023), which has been optioned as a limited streaming series; and his most recent novel, “The Human Scale,” released in the spring of 2025.
Jim Falk is President Emeritus of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth. Now residing in Santa Fe, NM, he is Vice Chairman of the Board of Global Santa Fe. In addition to hosting WorldNow with Jim Falk, Jim produces and hosts The Forum, a weekly talk show on KSFR-FM, Santa Fe Public Radio. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
