A deft, engaging portrait of a teeming, shape-shifting city.
A vigorous tour of Jerusalem in all its complexity.
In the three monotheist traditions, Jerusalem is a dreamlike place “of heavenly perfection, our city of joy”; it is also a distinctly physical entity that has endured enormous fracturing over the centuries. BBC journalist and travel writer Teller describes the lives of many of the city’s inhabitants as he attempts to reveal its contemporary essence. He ably investigates a crucial dichotomy: the “physical Jerusalem and [the] moral, spiritual one; an old, corrupted message and a new, clear one.” For ages, he writes, “it didn’t matter that the city had no river, no strategic value and no natural sources of commercial wealth. It had God.” Though accepted as the way it has always been, the division of the city into four quarters—Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish—actually occurred fairly arbitrarily in the mid-19th century thanks to British Protestant missionaries. Moving back and forth in time, Teller uses as a frame of reference the sequence of walls and gates implemented by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, taking readers through the labyrinthine neighborhoods that have grown up around those gates. The author chronicles his in-depth conversations with a wide, diverse swath of the population: Sufi mystics and religious figures of all kinds, of course, but also Palestinian, Indian, African, and Jewish shopkeepers; members of the Dom community (“socially, politically and economically these people are at the bottom of every heap”); and even “quadrilingual” Armenian rock star Apo Sahagian, who grew up in the Old City. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, citizen displacement has been widespread, and while Teller doesn’t delve deeply into this animus, the epilogue explores Palestinian restrictions and the toll of Partition. Overall, the author delivers an illuminating reexamination of an enduring city, a book that makes a satisfying complement to Andrew Lawler’s Under Jerusalem.
A deft, engaging portrait of a teeming, shape-shifting city.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-334-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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