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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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