Last Train to Istanbul by Ayşe Kulin

March 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Turkish by John W. Baker. AmazonCrossing, 2013. Originally published 2002. 395 pgs. Free download. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Selva married Rafael Alfandari, a Jewish man whose family settled in Turkey after being expelled from Spain in 1492. Neither the Alfandari family nor Selva’s parents, Fazil Resat Paşa and Leman Hanim, support the marriage and, after being cutoff, Selva and Rafael flee to Paris in the hopes of finding a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, Genocide, Holocaust, Middle East, ReadDiverse, Translated, Turkish • Tags: Ayşe Kulin

The Kurdish Bike by Alesa Lightbourne

March 1, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Self-published, 2016. 324 pgs. Library copy. When oil prices were high and ISIS had yet to sweep across Iraq and Syria, American teacher Theresa Turner was recruited to teach at an international academy in an autonomous region of Kurdish Iraq. Financially underwater from divorcing her unnamed husband, Turner had previously worked as an English teacher in Saudi Arabia and is eager to accept a job in a portion of the world where she might experience a bit […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Education, Fiction, Middle East • Tags: Alesa Lightbourne

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

February 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Hebrew. Harper, 2015. Originally published 2011. 541 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “A Brief History of Humankind”, Harari’s book covers three “revolutions” that shaped the course of history – the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution – before delving into a lesson in how culture binds the world together and a short speculation about the future. Beginning about 70,0000 years, the Cognitive Revolution led to the evolution of Neanderthals and other […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Chunkster, Economics, Europe, Hebrew, Indigenious Peoples, Middle East, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, South America, Translated, United States • Tags: Yuval Noah Harari

The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe

December 31, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Scribner, 2017. 416 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom”, Thorpe spent a year and a half in an English Language Acquisition (ELA) class at Denver’s South High School. The twenty-two students she shadowed arrived in America as refugees with little English comprehension from around the world, including Iraq via Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, and El Salvador. Over this period of time, these students struggled to adjust to […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Africa, Asia, Book Club, Education, Middle East, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, South America, Thailand, United States • Tags: Helen Thorpe

I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet

October 28, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — Kindle edition. Henry Holt and Co, 2017. 368 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad”, Mekhennet’s memoir begins with a recounting of her childhood in Morocco. Born in Germany, Mekhennet was sent to live with her grandmother in Morocco while her mother and father worked as a cook and cleaner, respectively, in Germany. Her exposure to the language and to her family’s history as Muslims in North Africa may have set her apart from […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Africa, Book Club, Europe, France, Germany, Middle East, Nonfiction, ReadDiverse, Religion • Tags: Souad Mekhennet

Shatila Stories by Omar Khaled Ahmad, Nibal Alalo, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safiya Badran, Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Samih Mahmoud, and Hiba Marei

October 9, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Peirene Press, 2018. Translated from the Arabic by Nashwa Gowanlock. Purchased. For Shatila Stories, the publisher commissioned nine Palestinian refugees — some born in the camp, some who fled to it from Syria — to tell the story of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Their short stories were then interwoven together to create a narrative that follows Adam and his extended. Adam’s older sister finds liberty within the camp; the economic freedom of having her own job […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Arabic, Fiction, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Peirene Press, ReadDiverse, Translated • Tags: Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Hiba Marei, Nibal Alalo, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Omar Khaled Ahmad, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Samih Mahmoud, Sefiya Badran

Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden

June 26, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Drawn & Quarterly, 2016. 298 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq”, Glidden’s graphic memoir recounts her travels through the Middle East with two friends reporting on the plight of refugees from the Iraq War. Glidden is there to report on the reporters; she wants to learn what journalism is and how journalists operate in their quest to tell a particular story. “What is journalism? Is it exposing your reader to a history they might […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Comics, Middle East, Nonfiction • Tags: Sarah Glidden

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me by Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman

February 23, 2016 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Hill and Wang, 2012. 176 pgs. Library copy.  Over the course of an afternoon in Ohio, Pekar interweaves the history of Judaism from Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac on the alter for God to expressions of the Jewish faith in 2011 with his own personal history as a Jew and a critic of Israel. Panels are devoted to depicting both histories — the personal and the publicly shared — as well as the time Pekar and Waldman spend […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Comics, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, United States • Tags: Harvey Pekar, J.T. Waldman, Joyce Brabner

Killing a King by Dan Ephron

December 23, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Print. 304 pgs. Library copy. On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel was assassinated as he left a pro-Oslo Accords peace rally in Israel by a twenty-five-year-old Israeli citizen named Yigal Amir, who justified his actions through the Talmudic concept of “rodef”. The law of “din rodef” allows an individual to kill a person in order to save innocent lives and, according to Amir, Rabin was guilt of murdering Israeli settlers in the West Bank because he […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Dan Ephron

An Iranian Metamorphosis by Mana Neyestani

April 20, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the French by Ghazal Mosadeq. Uncivilized Books, 2014. Originally published 2012. 160 pgs. Library copy. A cartoonist for a newspaper geared towards children in Iran, Neyestani drew a cartoon featuring a cockroach speaking an Azeri word – which is used to mean “what?” in Iranian Persian – in 2006 and ended up in one of Iran’s notorious secret jails. Such a sentence seems surprisingly harsh, but the Iranian government charged Neyestani with working against the […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Comics, French, Middle East, Nonfiction, Translated • Tags: Mana Neyestani

The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg

February 27, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Crown, 2014. 350 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan”, Nordberg’s book introduces readers to families who have made the decision to raise their daughters as bacha posh (“dressed up like a boy” in Dari). These young girls are raised as boys and, therefore, allowed to travel freely outside the home, attend school, work, and play with other children unlike females of all ages. As Nordberg explains, because Afghanistan is a patriarchal […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Book Club, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Jenny Nordberg

Journalism by Joe Sacco

December 27, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Metropolitan Books, 2012. 192 pgs. Library copy. This collection of short-form comics produced by Sacco for various journalist enterprises reports from conflict zones around the world — Gaza, Chechnya, Iraq — and as well as from areas trying to reconcile with the aftermath of those conflicts — migration from war torn African nations to Malta, the war tribunals for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, poverty amongst the Dalits (“untouchables”) in India. At the end of reprinted […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Comics, Europe, Genocide, India, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Russia • Tags: Joe Sacco