Book Review: A Herculean effort to tell real Palestinian stories

'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' by Ramzy Baroud is a collective history of Palestine told through the eyes of ordinary people. (Shutterstock)
Updated 14 January 2019
Follow

Book Review: A Herculean effort to tell real Palestinian stories

  • 'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' is a collective history of Palestine told through the eyes of ordinary people
  • Many of the stories overlap

CHICAGO: “The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story” by Ramzy Baroud is a collective history of Palestine told through the eyes of ordinary people who have witnessed it, lived through it and continue to fight for their homeland as they recall insurmountable losses and voice their dreams of returning. In this collection of harrowing, heartbreaking and resilient accounts, journalist Baroud attempts to unearth “the common ground of the Palestinian narrative, often separated by political division, geographical barriers and walls, factionalism, military occupation and grinding years of exile.” It is through this book that he is able to portray the stories and shared histories of generations who have fought for their homeland, and it is through their accounts that readers can immerse themselves in the rich soil of Palestine.

Baroud completed his PhD in the summer of 2015 and began a collaborative project with journalists and researchers to obtain a collection of personal Palestinian histories to record in a book, a kind of “reinterpretation” so readers could “appreciate the story as told by its tenacious victims.” Hundreds of Palestinian writers and bloggers around the world sent in their stories and the book was worked out over Skype interviews — all part of Baroud’s Herculean efforts to condense the narrative into complete, rich stories while staying true to each individual account.

Baroud first introduces his readers to Khaled Abdul Ghani Al-Lubani, also known as “Marco,” born in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, Syria. His life is made up of old maps and fables of Palestine. He is told tales of his grandfather, who worked for the government during the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1948, his village of Al-Mujaydil, a village that “had survived since before it was officially listed in Ottoman records in 1596,” was destroyed and his grandfather was forced to leave and seek refuge in Syria.

Many stories overlap, from the village of Al-Sawafir Al-Sharqiyya, where Abu Sandal’s father owned land that he lost to the Israeli army, to Tamam Nassar, who lived in Joulis until the war forced her to leave, to Hana Al-Shalabi, who staged a hunger strike in an Israeli prison after her brother was killed in the village of Burqin.

The loss and forced relocation recorded by Baroud is overwhelming, but important to read and remember.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’ by Erin Lin

Updated 18 November 2024
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’ by Erin Lin

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

Photo/Supplied
Updated 18 November 2024
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

  • Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land

Author: ERIN LIN

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

Updated 17 November 2024
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions.

Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In “The Spike,” Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Updated 16 November 2024
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

When World War II ended, about 1 million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria.

These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands.

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In “Lost Souls,” Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.


What We Are Reading Today: Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant

Photo/Supplied
Updated 15 November 2024
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant

  • Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat

Author: Audrey Borowski

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.

Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.