jiujensu's reviews
439 reviews

I should probably say something about each story, but I might give too much away. I'll just say that they are excellent, Kanafani is brilliant, and these fiction stories are a perfect way to understand what's going on now since 10/7/23. All the tragedy, resistance, loss. 

The final story is a novella. This is the story that inspired Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, which I also recommend. The symbolism of the lost son is perfect. Kind of an inverse prodigal son. They all imagine going home as parents might imagine meeting the son they were separated from. But the actual homeland and son are irrevocably different than you left them - you can't go back - you can't erase what happened - even though it isn't fair. So how, then, does one move forward? What does that look like? 

What did I just read?? Not disturbing like Watership Down, but disturbing in its own way. I'll be processing this one for awhile. It's a dark comedy set in academia. Satirical.

On the surface it's sort of a Mean Girls (but at grad school) critique of cliques or bad female friendships with maybe a horror/cult dimension. The - do you hate them or do you want to be them - question. The popular girls are called the bunnies and they're in a grad school narrative arts program at an Ivy League level school called. . . Warren. Yep. So there's plenty of criticism for the Ivy League, writing programs, grad school, and the pretentious writing of students.

There are some twists and turns I don't think I want to spoil, but you really start questioning everything you think you know. You might say it feels like you're falling down a rabbithole. Mona Awad builds and then ever so slightly takes away so that you're left disoriented and wanting more. I'm still not sure about some things. I need to read it again. But maybe not right away.

This is heartwrenching just on a human level - an accident with a busload of Kindergarteners. But woven in the retelling is a long list of confounding factors caused by the Israeli occupation that turned a bad situation that could happen anywhere into a large scale horrific tragedy that could have only happened in Palestine. 

This one definitely will go with nutrition and wellness books I recommend. Excellent info and wellness debunking. She gave the supplement industry and pseudoscience thre beating they deserve. Also discussed is the meaning we ascribe to fitness and wellness and how it's used to control things when other things in life are so out of control. She didn't leave out the systemic problems and our American obsession with individualism over the more beneficial community. It was a great nuanced treatment of the subject that everyone should read. 

A few quotes from the book - this first one I love:

"It's not that these people aren't smart. It's that they weren't properly trained to understand the scientific process and how to be critical thinkers. "If we give everybody a much more solid understanding of how data gets collected and what's good methodology, what's cherry-picking. . . they would be a little more adept at recognizing when they're being manipulated or when something being reported might not reflect reality, " says Kirshenbaum, "because it's very easy to fall for something, especially if you want to believe it.""

"A quarter of American women use fitness trackers. But for all the buzz, about half the users will tire of their shiny new tech toy and shove it into a drawer within six months. ... "This occurs because measurement can undermine intrinsic motivation," reads the study. "By drawing attention to output, measurement can make enjoyable activities feel more like work, which reduces their enjoyment.""

"People also overestimate just how much they think they know in science. Kirshenbaum points to the drama over genetically modified foods that have parents clutching their pearl onions. She co-directed a national survey that revealed that despitefears over demonized GMOs, 45 percent of American adults did not even know that all food contains DNA. "That's wild to me," says Kirshenbaum."

The story of workers struggling to get justice would be interesting enough, but effort taken to record the human stories makes this a must read. These experiences were so horrific, they forced worker protections that still in effect today (at least for now?).

All USians see in Leila Khaled is evil terrorist because of hijackings and Israel-biased press coverage, but there is so much more to her story. Whether it's the fact that she's a wife and mother, a leftist who believes in equality, a principled revolutionary who fights for the right of return and fair resolution to Israel's apartheid/occupation/genocide - all of it provides valid counterpoint to the most famous thing people claim to know about her.

Excellent. The author is a Palestinian Christian refugee and she traces her family history and history as a refugee in a stunning fashion as she is able to go back and physically visit Jerusalem, working at Ramallah Friends School in conflict resolution. As a result, there's a small look into the Quaker aspect, which is always interesting to me as it seems rather benign and more likely to promote introspection.

She describes the culture, sights and experience in Palestine with fresh eyes. Things that I enjoyed or that stood out in the way she brings you in: the details the pain and peace several times of being invited into now Israeli homes she knows the Palestinian owners were violently expelled from in 1948, the feeling that they were just leaving for a few weeks in 1948 until the violence subsided but were barred from returning, the myth that Arabs sold the land and Jews bought it is weirdly persistent, connection to the land, the food, the key, a Nakba commemoration in Jerusalem she organized, a Muslim funeral, multicultural history of Jerusalem and details of her conflict resolution with schoolchildren. 

This was a good one too. A historical fiction of the first inhabitants of what we call the US. Specifically, it deals with the poverty and the attempt at termination of treaties between the government and tribes, which would result in further extreme hardship. Boxing and Mormon missionaries also factor in. 

At the end, there are references to congressional transcripts and what historical figures inspire or correspond to fictional ones. 

So this second book is basically my review for the first book, but more so. There still isn't great development of female characters, but you'll get to know further the inner lives of two absolute trash people and one okay guy who might not turn out to be an abusive misogynist. There are some broad life, political, or philosophical questions covered that remind me of Russian authors, so it's not all bad. 

The part of my previous review:
At the end of Palace Walk, I'd say it makes a lot of sense to find he was influenced by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, etc. I thought of Anna Karenina while reading. I'd put it in the same classics category as the Russian greats.

An article I read suggested reading his later, nationalistic work or these instead: Ahmed Naji, Iman Mersal, Mohamed Salmawy, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Youssef Rakha.