DAYS OF LOVE AND RAGE

Fighting dictatorship and terrorism.

This authoritative work of journalism focuses on working- and middle-class people who helped rewrite their nation’s history. Not unlike No Good Men Among the Living (2014), his look at the human toll of America’s war in Afghanistan, Gopal’s latest foregrounds the ideas, threats, and challenges driving Syrians caught up in a civil war that killed more 600,000. The backdrop is Manbij, a city where “bricklayers and gym teachers and electricians and doctors and neighbors and friends” defied both Bashar al-Assad’s despotic government and Islamic State fanatics. Gopal’s street-level reporting takes us into homes, businesses, and boltholes, where freedom-seeking Syrians debate protest tactics, form what amount to “mini-parliaments of the people,” edit independent newspapers, and hide when regime planes begin bombing the city in the early 2010s. Later, many locals continue to resist when ISIS fighters arrive from abroad and establish a Repentance Office, organize lectures and a “religious trivia” contest, and execute the allegedly impious, throwing their bodies into a well. Gopal crafts indelible portraits of Manbij’s citizens, among them an erstwhile political prisoner who thinks “like a military general,” friends pulled apart by one’s embrace of ISIS, and a couple whose bond is endangered by differing views of the revolution. This is the product of a remarkable 2,000 interviews, some conducted by local researchers Gopal employed: “People did not always trust me, but they trusted their fellow Syrians.” This approach, which Gopal calls “collective journalism,” grants us access to memorable moments, as when Syrians living under tyranny elect a committee to organize anti-Assad protests. “It was the first vote of their lives,” Gopal writes. The above seamlessly meshes with enlightening passages on Syria’s history, politics, and economy, giving this powerful book a firm foundation.

Brave, inventive reporting yields an important account of an uprising that shook the Middle East.