21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

August 9, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Derek Perkins. Random House Audio, 2018. 11 hours, 41 minutes. Library copy. Based on the title, I assumed this book would provide 21 ways of how homo sapienswill need to adapt to life in the twenty-first century, as envisioned in Harari’s Homo Deus. Instead, Harari builds from one chapter to the next to explain how the current stories we collectively tell ourselves to orient our outlook and provide social cohesion are no longer accepted by […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Derek Perkins, Yuval Noah Harari

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, Nashwa Gowanlock, Nibal Alalo, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Omar Khaled Ahmad, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Samih Mahmoud, Sefiya Badran

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

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

Jerusalem by Guy Delisle

November 29, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Translated from the French. Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. Originally published 2008. 336 pgs. Library copy. Delisle’s book chronicles the year he spent living in the Holy City, specifically the Palestinian area known as East Jerusalem, with his wife and two children after his wife was posted in the West Bank by Doctors Without Borders (referred to by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, and initials, MFA, in the text). His travelogue provides an account of the major […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Comics, French, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Translated • Tags: Guy Delisle

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

November 7, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Little, Brown and Company, 2014. 227 pgs. Library copy. Over a twenty-four period, Baruch Kotler watches his affair become front page news of every newspaper in Israel after he refuses to change his stance on the West Bank settlements, flies to the Crimea with his young mistress Leora, and confronts Tankilevich, the man who denounced him to the KGB as a Zionist interloper almost forty years ago. Not only does Kotler have to confront the man who […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Giller Prize, Israel/Palestine, Middle East • Tags: David Bezmozgis

Thirteen Days in September by Lawrence Wright

October 7, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Knopf, 2014. 368 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David”, Wright’s book covers the development of the historic Camp David Accords of 1978  and the frameworks written during the Accords that would lead to the first peace treaty to exist between Israel and an Arab neighbor. He guides the reader through the event of each day explaining how the seesaw of negotiations tipped several times a day. Yet Wright steps back long enough […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Lawrence Wright

World War Z by Max Brooks

August 26, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Crown, 2006. 342 pgs. Library copy. Following the defeat of the zombies and the end of World War Z, the United Nations commissions a report as to the nature of the war – how did it begin?; who spread the zombie infection?; how did it end?. As the unnamed narrator writes in the introduction to this book, government bureaucracy and political correctness stepped in sanitizing the report and removing personal recollections and emotions about the war […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Book Club, China, Europe, Fiction, Israel/Palestine, Japan, Middle East, North America, Russia, South America, United States • Tags: Max Brooks

Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant

October 25, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. W. W. Norton, 2010. 253 pgs. Review copy. I agreed to read a copy of Leegant’s novel in exchange for an honest review after the author contacted me with a personalized request. She knew from my review policy that I enjoy reading books set in the Middle East and about religions of the world. This novel follows three individuals as they travel from New York to Jerusalem attempting to confront their pasts and their futures. Yona Stern […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Fiction, Israel/Palestine, Middle East • Tags: Joan Leegant

One Country by Ali Abunimah

January 7, 2011 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Metropolitan Books, 2006. 228 pgs. Library copy. As I mentioned in my most recent library loot, I heard Abunimah speak at my university back in November. I thought I would hear him discuss his “bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse ”, also the subtitle of this book, but he never even touched on it. What I heard from him, though, made me want to read the book. Time and time again politicians, academics, and so-called experts […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction • Tags: Ali Abunimah

The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller

December 2, 2010 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Bantam Dell, 2008. 408 pgs. Purchased. Assigned reading for my U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East class, and the source of much debate among my peers and I, Miller’s book is more of a personal reflection on his years as a peace negotiator for the Americans between the Israelis and the Palestinians than a historical account of the conflict. One of the kids in my class stated that because Miller is not a politician, maybe he […]

Categories: 2010 Reads, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Textbook • Tags: Aaron David Miller