A powerful look into occupied Gaza through the lenses of three ordinary young men.
A scholar of childhood trauma focuses on the stories of three Palestinians in this nonfiction case study.
Hammam, Khalil, and Hussam, writes Barber, “are ordinary people living in an extraordinary context.” All three are Palestinian men who came of age during the intifada and Israeli occupation of their home in the Gaza Strip. While the book’s insightful introductory chapter offers readers ample historical context, the author, a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, emphasizes that this is not “a book about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” Instead, it is a story of resilience, survival, and trauma, told from the perspectives of its three main subjects. Barber’s research on childhood trauma in war-torn environments took him on multiple trips to the Gaza Strip over the last three decades, where he developed a close relationship with the three young men. Stories shared by the trio range from the typical trials of adolescence—Hammam, for instance, spends entire chapters stressing over his school exams—to confrontations with the Israeli military. In one particularly harrowing anecdote involving both physical and sexual abuse, Hussam tells of witnessing a Palestinian assuring soldiers that he would “confess to anything” if released. Many of the stories defy Western narratives about Palestinian youth: In addition to getting highlights of Khalil’s day-to-day family life, readers learn of his history of political activism as he eschewed joining “the front lines of the stone throwers” to participate in behind-the-scenes organizations of demonstrations. As the author of multiple scholarly books on childhood psychology, Barber approaches the stories of Hammam, Khalil, and Hussam with an empathetic style that gives them space to tell their own stories. The book’s final section looks at the events of October 7, 2023 from a Palestinian perspective, providing an intimate exploration of the ways in which the subsequent Israeli response impacted the lives of three average Palestinian families. The book’s engaging narrative is supplemented by research footnotes, though it never reads like an academic text. The book includes photographs, maps, and other visual elements that complement its accessibility.
A powerful look into occupied Gaza through the lenses of three ordinary young men.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9789695892831
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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