Desperate, devastating, and difficult to read, making it all the more necessary.
A chilling day-by-day account of living in and fleeing from Gaza in the last three months of 2023.
“Pain cannot be talked about,” writes Abu Saif, author of A Suspended Life. “It cannot be expressed or written about. It is just felt and lived.” The author was born in 1973 in a refugee camp in Gaza, under the constant watch and threat of Israeli warships and surveillance, where displacement and the refugee status was repetitive and cyclical (and still is)—a place so familiar with violence that the attacks of October 7, 2023, were not even immediately recognizable as the beginning of a war. Abu Saif’s piercing diaries are proof of significant pain, as he provides records of overnight attacks, friends and family members killed, decisions about where to find safety, and debates over whether to stay in Gaza or flee south, as directed by the Israeli leaflets dropped from the sky. While offering some historical background for the terror that has plagued the region for decades, this is primarily an account of the suffering of a man and his people, painted in the bare and bracing brush strokes of someone pushed to the edges of his humanity, weakened by hunger and stress, forced to dig through rubble to find his own relatives. Abu Saif poses profound questions about the meaning of victory, the desire for survival, and the temporary nature of truce, alongside logistical (though no less pressing) ones like where to find bread or how to keep the elements of an impending winter at bay. In publishing his diaries, the author not only exposes the acts of the Israeli Defense Force to a world determined to look away, but also demands compassion and offers a critique of how the world makes news of war and genocide.
Desperate, devastating, and difficult to read, making it all the more necessary.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780807016848
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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