This won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Nonfiction in 2024 and it’s quite good.  On a rainy day in 2012 a semi-truck collided with a school bus and what with all of Jerusalem’s rules and regulations it felt like all hell had broken loose.  For some people it had.  Six 5-year olds and their teacher were killed that day.  

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: |
Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy 
by Nathan Thrall, 2024 
Read by Peter Ganim 6h 44m
Rating, 8.5   / General Nonfiction 
(Both read and listened)

What the book covers is the chaos at the scene and how the picky details of Israeli regulations specifying who can go where add to the horror. Thrall, the author, also includes varying amounts of background to give he reader a sense of the guilt felt by far more people than others.  

At only 255 pages it’s a short book, but taking place in the Israeli occupied territory of Palestine it’s compellingly dense and complex. There’s a list in the front section organizing the dozens of characters in the 5 Parts of the book. Almost all are Palestinian residents of the Jerusalem so many of them are related and/or work together.   

That said, I’m not sure it’s important to remember each character’s inter-relationships, although it’s certainly helpful to remember the 2 or 3 most important ones – Abed,  Haifa and Milad. Those are the parents and child we follow as word of their son’s involvement gets out . But all these characters are also important to the sense of chaos and tension.