Book picks similar to
Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland by Juliane Hammer
biography
ebooks
global-diasporas
palestine
Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East
Jeremy Bowen - 2003
It is the most troubled region on earth. At its heart is the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis - and the legacy of six days of war in 1967.After the state of Israel emerged from war in 1948, both sides knew more battles were coming. In June 1967, years of slow-burning tension exploded. In six extraordinary days, Israel destroyed the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. But far from bringing peace, as many Israelis hoped, their stunning victory turned into a curse.From the initial battle order issued to the Israeli air force on Monday June 5, 1967 to the final ceasefire on the evening of Saturday the 10th, the Six-Day War was a riveting human drama. Building on his first-hand experience of the region after his five years as the BBC's Middle East Correspondent, as well as extensive original research, Jeremy Bowen presents a compelling new history of the conflict. Six Days recreates day by day, hour by hour, the bullying and brinckmanship that led four nations to war, interweaving testimonies of combatants from all sides in a seamless narrative.A rigorous and original piece of modern history is as vivid as fiction, Six Days not only sheds new light on one of the key conflicts of the twentieth century, it explains much about the Middle East and the problems the region still faces today.
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
Karen Armstrong - 1996
. . Eminently sane and patient . . . Essential reading for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike."--The Washington PostVenerated for millennia by three faiths, torn by irreconcilable conflict, conquered, rebuilt, and mourned for again and again, Jerusalem is a sacred city whose very sacredness has engendered terrible tragedy. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly praised A History of God, traces the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all laid claim to Jerusalem as their holy place, and how three radically different concepts of holiness have shaped and scarred the city for thousands of years.Armstrong unfolds a complex story of spiritual upheaval and political transformation--from King David's capital to an administrative outpost of the Roman Empire, from the cosmopolitan city sanctified by Christ to the spiritual center conquered and glorified by Muslims, from the gleaming prize of European Crusaders to the bullet-ridden symbol of the present-day Arab-Israeli conflict. Written with grace and clarity, the product of years of meticulous research, Jerusalem combines the pageant of history with the profundity of searching spiritual analysis. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Jerusalem is a book for the ages."THE BEST SERIOUS, ACCESSIBLE HISTORY OF THE MOST SPIRITUALLY IMPORTANT CITY IN THE WORLD."--The Baltimore Sun"A WORK OF IMPRESSIVE SWEEP AND GRANDEUR."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
Psycho.com: serial killers on the internet
Eileen Ormsby - 2020
The internet has put them in our pocketsPsycho.com is a chilling look at what happens when murderous minds meet modern technology by the bestselling author of The Darkest WebThis book expands on three cases originally released in edited form for the Casefile True Crime podcast:Pedro Rodrigues Filho, aka Pedrinho Matador, aka Killer PeteyDnepropetrovsk Maniacs, aka the Hammer ManiacsMark Twitchell, aka Dexter Serial Killer
The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace
Aaron David Miller - 2008
efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace. His position as an advisor to presidents, secretaries of state, and national security advisors has given him a unique perspective on a problem that American leaders have wrestled with for more than half a century. Why has the world’s greatest superpower failed to broker, or impose, a solution in the Middle East? If a solution is possible, what would it take? And why after so many years of struggle and failure, with the entire region even more unsettled than ever, should Americans even care? Is Israel/Palestine really the “much too promised land”?
As a historian, analyst, and negotiator, perhaps no one is more qualified to answer these questions than Aaron David Miller. Without partisanship or finger-pointing, Miller lucidly and honestly records what went right, what went wrong, and how we got where we are today. Here is an insider’s view of the peace process from a place at the negotiating table, filled with unforgettable stories and colorful behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Here, too, are new interviews with all the key players, including Presidents Carter, Ford, Bush forty-one, all nine U.S. secretaries of state, as well Arab and Israeli leaders, who disclose the inner thoughts and strategies that motivated them. The result is a book that shatters all preconceived notions to tackle the complicated issues of culture, religion, domestic politics, and national security that have defined—and often derailed—a half century of diplomacy.Honest, critical, and certain to be controversial, this insightful first-person account offers a brilliant new analysis of the problem of Arab-Israeli peace and how, against all odds, it still might be solved.From the Hardcover edition.
The Parisian
Isabella Hammad - 2019
He discovers that everything is fragile: love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong.Isabella Hammad delicately unpicks the tangled politics and personal tragedies of a turbulent era – the Palestinian struggle for independence from the British Mandate, the strife of the early twentieth century and the looming shadow of the Second World War. An intensely human story amidst a global conflict, The Parisian is historical fiction with a remarkable contemporary voice.
Shunt: The Story of James Hunt
Tom Rubython - 2010
In this account of his life, the author has examined every detail of the driver's life - from his very earliest days to the last hours of his existence - as well as the lives of those he left behind.
Salt Houses
Hala Alyan - 2017
She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand—one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.
On Palestine
Noam Chomsky - 2015
The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.
1949: The First Israelis
Tom Segev - 1986
In 1949, a controversial best-seller in Israel, Tom Segev draws on thousands of declassified documents along with personal diaries and correspondence to reconstruct the unvarnished story of Israel's first year.Segev reveals the lofty aspirations that guided the state's leaders as well as the darker side of the Zionist utopia: the friction between the early settlers and the immigrants, the lack of good-faith negotiations with the Arabs; the clash between religious and secular factions; the daily collision of the Zionist myth with the severe realities of life in the new state. Unflinching in its observations, this bold chronicle is indispensible for understanding the dilemmas that continue to confront--and divide--Israeli society.
The Blue Between Sky and Water
Susan Abulhawa - 2015
The men here, those who have escaped prison or the battlefields, worry over making ends meet, tend their tattered pride, join the resistance. The women are left to be breadwinners and protectors, too. Nazmiyeh is the matriarch, the center of a household of sisters, daughters, granddaughters, whose lives threaten to spin out of control with every personal crisis, military attack, or political landmine. Her brother’s granddaughter Nur is stuck in America; her own daughter’s son, traumatized in an Israeli assault, slips into another kind of exile; her daughter has cancer and no access to medicine. Their neighbor, the Beekeeper’s wife, will extract the marijuana resin to shrink her tumor, but it is also Nazmiyeh’s large heart and zest for life that heals, that will even call Nur back from the broken promise of America and set her on a new path. All Nazmiyeh’s loved ones will return to her, and ultimately journey further, to that place between the sky and water where all is as it once was, and where all will meet again.Born of a troubling history that continues to rage forth and claim its dead, The Blue Between Sky and Water is a novel of survival and of the vivid, powerful women who manage to enlarge and enliven the everyday. It is a novel for our time—and one that is also timeless.
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Michael Chabon - 2017
Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers will gain unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news, as well as deeper understanding of the conflict as experienced by the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.
Tanker Pilot: Lessons from the Cockpit
Mark Hasara - 2018
Lt. Col Mark Hasara—who has twenty-four years’ experience in flying missions around the world—provides keen and eye-opening insights on success and failure, and emphasizes the importance of always being willing to learn. He provides twelve essential lessons based on his wartime experience and his own personal photographs from his missions during the Cold War, Gulf War, and Iraq War. With a foreword by #1 New York Times bestselling author and radio host Rush Limbaugh, this is a military memoir not to be missed.
White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa
Sharon Rotbard - 2005
Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv glitters white, its Bauhaus-influenced modernist architecture betraying few traces of the city which once stood where it now stands: the Arab city of Jaffa. In this book, Sharon Rotbard blows apart this palimpsest in a clear, fluent and challenging style, which promises to force the reality of what so many have praised as 'progress' into the mainstream discourse. A book that works on many levels, White City, Black City is, all at once, an angry uncovering of a vanished history, a book mourning the loss of an architectural heritage, a careful study in urban design and a beautifully written narrative history. It is in all senses a political book, but one that expands beyond the typical. This book promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv - its publication in Hebrew was hailed as 'path-breaking' and a 'masterpiece'.
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria
Wendy Pearlman - 2017
The government’s ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our times.Yet despite all the reporting, the video, and the wrenching photography, the stories of ordinary Syrians remain unheard, while the stories told about them have been distorted by broad brush dread and political expediency. This fierce and poignant collection changes that. Based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians conducted over four years across the Middle East and Europe, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is a breathtaking mosaic of first-hand testimonials from the frontlines. Some of the testimonies are several pages long, eloquent narratives that could stand alone as short stories; others are only a few sentences, poetic and aphoristic. Together, they cohere into an unforgettable chronicle that is not only a testament to the power of storytelling but to the strength of those who face darkness with hope, courage, and moral conviction.
King's X: The Oral History
Greg Prato - 2019
But their story is one of many ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and periods of good and bad luck. This authorized biography examines and explores all aspects of their history, both personally and professionally. Comprised of extensive interviews conducted by author and longtime King’s X fan Greg Prato, King’s X: The Oral History allows the band’s three members - singer/bassist Doug Pinnick, guitarist Ty Tabor, and drummer Jerry Gaskill - to tell their full story for the first time. It also opens the floor to friends and collaborators, plus some of the many top rock names who are also fans of the band, including Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, The Police’s Andy Summers, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, Pantera’s Rex Brown, Mötley Crüe’s Mick Mars, and many more. In addition, King’s X explores the stories behind every single song the band has recorded over the years, while also detailing the creation of each of their twelve albums and offering insight into the influence of religion on their work. It also features memories of the band’s tours with some of rock’s biggest names - including AC/DC, Pearl Jam, and Mötley Crüe - and the events that led to their show-stopping performance at the mammoth Woodstock ’94 festival. Packed full of rare and never-before-seen photographs from throughout their career, King’s X is the definitive companion to the band and their music.