Readers able to put aside the larger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will find here a very human, up-close, and...
A searing memoir of daily life in Gaza from July 6 to Aug. 26, 2014, when the territory was under constant bombardment by Israel.
Palestinian political scientist, columnist, and novelist Abu Saif (A Suspended Life, 2014, etc.), who was born in 1973 in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, describes moment to moment the experience of living under fire. While shells fly in from ships at sea and rockets from tanks on the ground, it is the drones overhead that fill the author with dread. As he writes while breaking the fast during Ramadan, “the drone eats with me.” Abu Saif’s diary shows the horror in detail: the sounds, the smells, the sights. He is a husband and father intent on keeping his family safe, though he knows he cannot. Anyone looking for an analysis of the political situation, a discussion of who started the conflict and why, will not find it here. What the author offers instead is a vivid picture of living surrounded by death and destruction, going to sleep hoping you will awake, fearing for the safety of your loved ones, seeing the fear in your children’s eyes, and knowing that the next bomb could be the one that destroys them all. The diary has been augmented after the fact to provide additional information: when a day’s entry gives the numbers of Palestinians killed, footnotes often give the names of the individuals; maps of Gaza highlight areas under attack, providing a guide to readers unfamiliar with the geography of the territory; and end-of-book notes offer further background. Portions of this diary appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and Slate, and the book was previously published in England last year.
Readers able to put aside the larger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will find here a very human, up-close, and personal picture of war.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4910-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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