Readers able to put aside the larger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will find here a very human, up-close, and...
A searing memoir of daily life in Gaza from July 6 to Aug. 26, 2014, when the territory was under constant bombardment by Israel.
Palestinian political scientist, columnist, and novelist Abu Saif (A Suspended Life, 2014, etc.), who was born in 1973 in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, describes moment to moment the experience of living under fire. While shells fly in from ships at sea and rockets from tanks on the ground, it is the drones overhead that fill the author with dread. As he writes while breaking the fast during Ramadan, “the drone eats with me.” Abu Saif’s diary shows the horror in detail: the sounds, the smells, the sights. He is a husband and father intent on keeping his family safe, though he knows he cannot. Anyone looking for an analysis of the political situation, a discussion of who started the conflict and why, will not find it here. What the author offers instead is a vivid picture of living surrounded by death and destruction, going to sleep hoping you will awake, fearing for the safety of your loved ones, seeing the fear in your children’s eyes, and knowing that the next bomb could be the one that destroys them all. The diary has been augmented after the fact to provide additional information: when a day’s entry gives the numbers of Palestinians killed, footnotes often give the names of the individuals; maps of Gaza highlight areas under attack, providing a guide to readers unfamiliar with the geography of the territory; and end-of-book notes offer further background. Portions of this diary appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and Slate, and the book was previously published in England last year.
Readers able to put aside the larger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will find here a very human, up-close, and personal picture of war.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4910-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
