A concise, essential history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Palestinian lawyer and writer contextualizes Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Decades after Israeli forces displaced his family from their ancestral home in Jaffa, Shehadeh, author of Occupation Diaries, Where the Line Is Drawn, and other acclaimed books, asks fundamental questions: Why haven’t Israelis and Palestinians ended their conflict peacefully? Why has the global community allowed Israeli occupation to continue? How will the “terrible human toll” in the current conflict affect the world’s opinion of Israel? The author seeks answers in the tales Israelis tell about their country’s origins. In 1948, for example, the invasion the Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”) is known in Israel as the “war of independence.” Shehadeh claims that this terminology allows Israel to justify the idea that its establishment allowed Jews to return to a biblical homeland and to erase the reality of the Israeli government as a colonizing force. “The conceit goes that prior to the ‘return’ of the exiled Jews, there was a land devoid of people,” he writes. This elimination of the Palestinian people continues through the international decision to deny Palestinians refugee status, while the false decolonization narrative allows the world to ignore problematic Israeli history—e.g., former Ariel Sharon’s open admiration for South African apartheid and Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to build a fence along the Gazan border, saying, “In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.” The author leaves his final question about the future of Palestine unanswered, and he ends with a quote from poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in late 2023. Shehadeh’s clarity of thought, conversational voice, and sharp analysis render this book a quick, fascinating read, and his passion for his people and their plight infuse the book with exactly the right pace and tone.
A concise, essential history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781635425352
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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