A beautifully impressionistic exploration of shared cultural understanding despite the narrowing of borders.
One of Palestine’s most respected writers reflects on 50 years of Israeli occupation and riven friendships.
With grieving family driven out of their Jaffa home after the founding of Israel in 1948, an event the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), Shehadeh (Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice, 2015, etc.), who was born in 1951, grew up among a deeply oppressed people under the increasingly “imperial arrogance” of the occupier. In these essays, fashioned like short stories, the author looks back on five decades of occupation through the prism of unlikely friendships with Israelis and sticky crossings between the two sides. Shehadeh’s father was an enlightened lawyer who believed fervently in the possibility of peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, even bringing his son, recently returned from studying law in London, to hear Egyptian president Anwar Sadat address the Knesset in Tel Aviv on Nov. 20, 1977, an experience the author recounts in “Henry.” From this first encounter between two young seekers—Henry, an Israeli with a doctorate in psychology from Yale, and the author, who was trying to figure out his own way in life amid the “stifling, traditional society” of Ramallah—a lifelong friendship was born, though it became rocky as the two Intifadas spiraled out. Indeed, as Shehadeh immersed himself in human rights activism, “politics began to cast a dark shadow over my relationship with Henry.” In other essays, the author chronicles his return to Jaffa, the city of his father—who, we learn, was murdered in the 1980s by an Israeli collaborator—and wonders what his life would be like had his family insisted on staying. Shehadeh learned Hebrew once it became clear that the Israeli occupation was not going to end, and the border patrols and restrictions grew increasingly onerous and terrifying.
A beautifully impressionistic exploration of shared cultural understanding despite the narrowing of borders.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-291-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A carefully researched account of the antienvironmentalist ``Wise Use'' Movement, which has launched a ``holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.'' Helvarg, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker, went behind the front lines to interview the movement's leaders, its grassroots supporters, industry and New Right backers, as well as the victims of the rising tide of antigreen violence. Helvarg brilliantly documents the creeping polarization in American life that we see also in such issues as abortion rights and gun control. As much as environmentalists want to preserve nature, some industries want to preserve unlimited access to natural resources, employees want to preserve their jobs, and property owners want to preserve their right to dispose of their land as they wish. The antienvironmentalist backlash, best exemplified by the ``Wise Use'' Movement, has received considerable attention from the conservative press and key figures such as Rush Limbaugh. But Helvarg faults sympathetic coverage in the mainstream press, particularly the New York Times, for giving the movement more credibility and respectability than its numbers and tactics warrant. His investigation reveals that Wise Use/Property Rights activists are few in number and need to resort to intimidation and violence to be effective in local confrontations. He visits an antilogging protester who was maimed by a car bomb, an antitoxics activist who was raped and tortured, and others who were beaten, shot at, had their dogs mutilated, cars run off the road, and homes burned down. He contends that these and thousands of other cases of harassment are effectively silencing many grassroots environmental activists. More disturbing is the lack of interest on the part of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, in looking into these threats and acts of violence. A thought-provoking and timely exposÇ.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-87156-459-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones— wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)—but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness—and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)—``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record—slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42075-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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