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WHAT WE REMEMBER WILL BE SAVED

A STORY OF REFUGEES AND THE THINGS THEY CARRY

Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.

A journalist and religion scholar who has traveled widely in the Middle East delivers poignant, humanizing stories of war refugees from Syria and Iraq.

In these stories, gleaned from travels in 2016 and 2017 in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, and Greece, Saldaña, the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, uses the theme of what refugees in flight were able to carry with them—often only the clothes on their backs. On Aug. 6, 2014, the Islamic State group invaded an ancient Christian community in Qaraqosh, Iraq, and 44,000 Christians were forced to flee. In Amman, Jordan, where many relocated, the author met a woman named Hana, who described how she and the other women re-created their previous social world, in which the sewing of dresses was an important tradition. “So I learned that objects could speak or elicit a memory,” writes Saldaña. “And I learned that when the places you love begin to disappear, you begin to live in them all the time.” In Istanbul, she tracked down Hozan, a famous Kurdish buzuq player, and his musician friend Ferhad, both from al-Hasakeh, Syria, which was riven by that nation’s civil war. Saldaña also recounts the horrendous conditions in a refugee camp in Greece called Moria, which was designed for 2,300 people but, by 2017, housed more than 7,000. The author’s exploration of Moria is particularly heartbreaking, as she clearly portrays the awful plight of the refugees as well as the unwillingness of many Western countries to assist. Finally, Saldaña traveled to a convent in Germany where a group of Yazidi, “members of a small and highly persecuted religious minority from northern Iraq,” found shelter from the violence of IS. Throughout this compassionate book, the author demonstrates the resilience of refugees, who carry with them their precious languages, cultures, and memories.

Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781506484211

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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