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throwback682's review against another edition
emotional
informative
medium-paced
5.0
This book covers a lot of people and their stories. It can be hard to keep track and follow who is who. But it’s very worth it. As many have said, this true story reads like a novel. And, it illustrates so powerfully life for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The very real deaths of human children in this story paint a picture like a metaphor all the ways that settler colonialism harms people. You can easily understand how everything could’ve been different for these families without borders and walls and checkpoints and various classes of IDs and different emergency services. This book taught me a lot without being dry.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Domestic abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, Grief, Confinement, Death, Car accident, War, Genocide, Religious bigotry, Toxic relationship, Child death, Islamophobia, and Fire/Fire injury
carie's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.25
paolagabriellas's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
lawtina4567's review against another edition
2.0
This book was interesting. I agree the other reviewers that the title felt misleading. I expected the book to be a deep dive into the day of the accident, and it wasn’t. While it covered real people because so many were introduced it was hard to really bond with each person because each of them only had a small portion of the book devoted to them. I wished the book told us how other survivors of the crash were doing now.
Additionally, the book was written as nonfiction… but I definitely noticed some biases/selective interpretations of history. For example, Deir Yassen, it’s well known that Israel built a psych hospital over the remains of the village, but the book claims that a Jewish village was built over the remains. I googled it, and the Jewish village in question was built in the early 1900s well before the massacre.
He also attributed the Second Intifada to Sharon’s visit to Haram Al Sharif but historians today discredit that and point to a variety of other factors and decisions that led to it.
These are pretty basic things, but it makes one then question the veracity/accuracy of the rest of the book. While I do not doubt the checkpoints, the oppression, the daily struggle of the Palestinians, it made me wonder what else the author might have changed or leaned on to prove his point/message/aim.
I’m skeptical of any book that presents either group as wholly evil or good, and I felt that this nonfiction book had a clear bias. And some may wonder why that matters, but the truth of the situation is sad enough without giving into biases.
Additionally I can’t help but wonder, if the author believes everything he wrote… then why in the world is he still living in Jerusalem?
shmommysreading's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
3.0