A record of a country and people in crisis rendered in fearless, anguishing detail.
Seif-Eldeine’s debut chapbook acts as a vigil for the people of Syria.
Even when embedded, dedicated journalists can’t always fully capture the emotional cost of war and disaster. So, artists, writers, and poets step in to describe their impact for those who live beyond the headlines and to provide perspective to stories that might otherwise remain untold. In this chapbook, Seif-Eldeine chronicles the psychic damage of more than a decade of conflict in Syria, much like a reporter would; he oscillates between being an observer and a participant, conveying the experiences of ordinary Syrian citizens under violent oppression and intermingling them with accounts from first-person speakers who grapple with sacrifice and the sheer emotional weight of survival. In these works, war destroys even the most mundane objects and tasks. Prayer rugs become Kevlar vests in the poem “What Prayer Rugs Collect”; nuptials transpire in camps of those on the run from destruction (“Refugee Wedding”), and even the smallest pleasures vanish from everyday lives (“Who Wants French Cigarettes in Syria?”). Over the course of this collection, Seif-Eldeine is careful not to simply damn the perpetrators of violence, aside from president and dictator Bashar al-Assad. He considers what motivates people’s support for al-Assad in “Talking Politics in Syria,” and he makes no value judgments about human losses on both sides; in his works, every soldier is a “wild / mouthed child of a war” (“The First Kill”). He records and honors the experiences of farmers, housewives, the highly educated, soldiers, and foreign-born nationals alike.
It’s the way the poet conveys these stories and alludes to his own personal burdens that’s so arresting and strikes so deeply. The poems convey grief without pity and pomp; the entanglement of sorrow and fury may catch readers off guard in lines such as “the pines we chop down / for Christmas: green and red. / Did the triage doctor mark me / green, or red like the sea?” (“The Soldier’s Last Thoughts”) and “On days I am King, I give up / my lamb to my children. / Their stomachs are as empty / as a gun that has run out of clips” (“King or Queen for a Day”). In his Syria, neither death nor life has any dignity; bodies full of bullets expel excrement when retrieved, marriages buckle into isolation and abuse, and children are sold to pay for food and shelter. Concrete details are interspersed among lyrical accounts of such things as an offhandedly expressed death toll, al-Assad’s experience with dentistry (depicted as a metaphor for his tyranny), and the growth of refugee camps in neighboring countries. But Seif-Eldeine is most harrowing when he uses small moments and details to convey the true scale of suffering in an ongoing conflict, as when a woman paints in a blurry Van Gogh–like style because she lost her glasses in a bombing, or a farmer harvesting his crops remarks on his “watermelons larger than decapitated heads.”
A record of a country and people in crisis rendered in fearless, anguishing detail.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798375000510
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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