A chorus of lyrical voices singing hopefully about a most contentious, divisive, and violent situation.
Two co-founders of the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), mother and son, collect an array of emotional pieces from this international gathering of writers begun in 2008.
Editors Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014, etc.) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017, etc.) begin and end the collection—she with an introduction and an essay; he with the longest piece, which encapsulates the conference since 2008. There are some poems, as well, including Suheir Hammad’s affecting “The Gaza Suite,” whose sections are distributed throughout. The collection includes plenty of notable writers familiar to Western readers: the late Henning Mankell, Geoff Dyer, Alice Walker, and Chinua Achebe, whose offerings range from tributes to the PalFest itself to accounts of their own experiences attending. There is also a touching account of Richard Ford’s nearly breaking down while reading a Seamus Heaney poem. Most of the writers, though, are from the region, and their messages—oft repeated—are clear: Israel is, in their view, basically running an open-air prison; countless innocent civilians, including many children, have died; Israel is in the process of erasing the evidence of many generations of inhabitants. These, of course, are not messages that will attract Israel’s many supporters, but others in the West—who, as some of the authors here point out, know little about the conflict—will no doubt be alarmed at the vast array of grim detail and example. Although the writers concur that Israel is doing something awful, there are few allusions to a violent response. Instead, the writers express the belief that words will be the things with feathers that will eventually bring attention—and peace. Other notable contributors include J.M. Coetzee, Raja Shehadeh, Michael Ondaatje, Claire Messud, Teju Cole, Pankaj Mishra, and Kamila Shamsie.
A chorus of lyrical voices singing hopefully about a most contentious, divisive, and violent situation.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-884-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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