Becky's Books –

Maybe I wasn’t in the mood, but it really took me some time to get into this book. Or maybe I’ve been reading a bit too much lately.  ???  And then this one got a bit too gritty in places.  ???  Once I got warmed up the book was fine, but it took almost half the book! 

The Waiting
by Michael Connelly, 2024
Read by a small cast
Rating: A / crime thriller-procedural

Anyway,  Michael Connelly’s new crime thriller is the 6th in the Ballard and Bosch series. Harry Bosch retired from the LAPD awhile back and Renée Ballard came on the scene as a detective and is now assigned to the Cold but Open Cases. Harry is very ill with leukemia added to cancer, but he helps Renée in an advisory capacity, as much as he can.  And we have Bosch’s adult daughter Madeleine on the scene looking toward her dad as she works her way up in the LAPD. This case involves a serial rapist and murderer.  

Minor Detail is a 2017 novel by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli. It was translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2023 and nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, and won the LiBeraturpreis [de] in 2023.  

Minor Detail
By Adania Shibl (Palestinian) 2017
Translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2021
Read by Sirii Scott, 3h 57m
Rating:  9.5 / contemporary fiction

There are two parts to this short but highly rated novel.  Part I concerns the historical event of Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert raping and murdering  a young Palestinian (Bedouin) woman. This was during the 1st Arab-Israeli War of Independence in 1948-’49. It’s referred to as the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” in Arabic.  

Part II occurs 50 years later when Israel is still occupying, colonizing by settlement and periodically fighting the Palestinians, all in violation of International Law.  Now, in the present day, another young Palestinian woman has come across the news of the first woman and is doing her own on-site research in the Negev, at least in part for her own satisfaction – she’s a journalist.  

There are no names assigned in the book In this case I’m not sure if that depersonalizes the characters, as is usually the case, or depersonalizes them. The woman of today’s world is very sympathetic and personalized for me, but not so much the woman of the past, perhaps it distances her but also there is nowhere near as much information about her.

 What gets named are places and things. The place names on a very old map tell her where she would be in the Palestine of 1948, but those on the newer, current, map are all just in a big yellow area indicating “occupied territory.”

 This is a highly literary novel with quite a lot of symbolism. The writing is minimal yet quite sensual and lush in its own way and places. The structure shows once again that “the past… isn’t even past,” (Thank you, Mr Faulkner) in that the “Nakba.” the catastrophe, has not ended. As Egina Manachova wrote in the Chicago Review, “In Minor Detail’s world of shifting borders, the past cannot be simply denied; it bleeds into the present at every turn.”

I’m not going to describe the plot of this incredible book further because spoilers would likely interfere with the sense of “A-ha!” when the readers puts things together for themselves. This is NOT a book to “enjoy,” though. – it’s pretty grim.) 

One overarching theme is that of “borders” and how borders don’t stay put. These are physical, legal, and mental borders, even life and death borders get blurred and, ultimately, the past seems to, yes, “bleed’ right into the present.

https://mondoweiss.net/2019/09/denial-israeli-kibbutz/
https://www.chicagoreview.org/adania-shibli-minor-detail/

Becky spells the Month in Books for October 2024 Linkup

The original from Reviews from the Stacks
< https://reviewsfromthestacks.wordpress.com/2024/10/05/spell-the-month-in-books-october-2024-linkup/#more-24362.> is a pretty straightforward monthly linkup. Find a book title that starts with each letter in the month’s name, make a list, share your link, and that’s it!

Here are my results – I constrained myself to books I’ve read in 2024. You can see I mostly read history and historical fiction, memoirs and these were all excellent. My reviews linked and on site.

OCTOBER

I read On Call by Anthony Fauci, MD in August 2024 – (memoir) – rating 9

I read Covered With Night by Nicole Eustace in February 2024 (history) – rating 10 (Pulitzer)

I read Tribe by Sebastian Junger in August 2024) –   memoir/psychology (rating B)

I read On Freedom by Timothy Snyder in September 2024 ( philosophy / political science /  (Rating B)

I read Being Mortal 3 times by Atul Gawandi (the latest was in August 2024. memoir / medicine the latest read was in (Rating A)

Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black (published 2023) history /current events Israel/Palestine. -Kindle and Audio –
Currently Reading! (So far an A)

I read Remember You’re a Wiley by Maya Wiley in September 2024 Rating an A-

This is Burke’s latest book and it’s a stand alone.  I tried to like it.  I’ve enjoyed every single book he’s written and I don’t think I’ve missed many.  Burke has said this one is his best and I did notice there’s a sharper literary edge to it, a more Biblical use of the language.  But I dozed off twice and then went back to where I knew I’d already read and tried again only to find myself snoozing again.  

Flags on the Bayou ~ 
By James Lee Burke 2024
Read by a cast. 9h 15m
Rating:  ??? –   / Civil War tale 
(a standalone)

I did get through the whole thing though and I’m not going to send it back because I suspect there is a plot line I’m not quite following but …. I’m not at all fond of fictional war stories.  It jumps back and forth between characters and sometimes between time-frames.  There are too many actors reading the script and they’re hard to distinguish – even between male and female.  There’s a lot of vulgar language which would be okay if I were really following the action.  

In my defense I did read White Doves at Morning back in 2001when it came out and although I was a wee bit disappointed that the protagonist wasn’t Dave Robicheaux, I thoroughly appreciated it – I enjoyed it – liked it – but not passionately. .

I’ll might try Flags on the Bayou again before too long because I feel like I missed something. I’m not promising anything, though. It’s just that this book feels like it’s out in left field for me.

This won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Nonfiction in 2024 and it’s soooo good.  

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: |
Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy 
by Nathan Thrall
2024 by Macmillan Publishing Group / 255 pages 
Read by Peter Ganim 6h 44m
Rating 9.75 / General Nonfiction 
(Both read and listened)

NOTE** This excerpt is from the Prologue which is nat a part of the Audible version

I think it may have been added on after either the author or an editor saw that the body of the book didn’t quite gel around a plot and the reader was dumped into the main plot without knowing who the characters were.  Terrible mess that might be for some.   I’m very glad this is my second reading and that I have the Audble as well as the Kindle. Without the Kindle version a LOT would have been lost.  That Prologue seems innocuous, but it sets the stage very nicely.  The

I really enjoyed Comey’s 1st book, A Higher Loyalty, a nonfiction about his time with the Trump administration’s FBI https://mybecky.blog/2018/04/21/a-higher-loyalty-truth-lies-and-leadership-by-james-comey/ so I thought it might be an idea to try one of his two fictions he’s had published since then.  Well, okay,  it was an idea, but not a terribly good one- 

Westport
by James Comey
Read by Cassandra Campbell 10h 47m
Rating:  C / thriller 

The idea was interesting maybe even good, but after the first few chapters I just never could get into it. The characters seemed undifferentiated and a lot of the story seemed to unnecessarily involve romances of various sorts.  Not my cuppa.  It’s a who-done-it more than a thriller – the characters have thriller-type personas and the plot sticks more with interviews than chase scenes.

I’ve read a couple books by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, which is a fascinating but kind of bloody rehash of WWs I and II as it charged through Ukraine. Another is On Tyranny which was published just after Trump took office in 2017.  It has a message. 

On Tyranny
by Timothy Snyder
September, 2024
Read by author 10h 48m
Rating: 8 / politics-philosophy

This one has a message, too.  Snyder defines, categorizes and analyzes the word and he came out on top. To me – his major point is that we have choices.  After an Introduction on Freedom, the book is divided into 5 chapters; Sovereignty, Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality, and Solidarity followed by a Conclusion,  chapter on Government.  

He uses the ideas of “positive freedom” (freedom to ….)  and “negative freedom”  (freedom from…) to explain some things. I find this a bit dated and simplistic, but it can be helpful at a basic level.  

I was soooo enjoying the read until I got to about page 162 or so, the Chapter Factuality. Then I sensed a stretch on Snyder’s part to make the ideas fit and it seemed to get pedantic and simplistic, both.  He comes back again and again to Ukraine which was the subject of Bloodlands, too.  

I think Snyder makes for a better historian than philosopher or political scientist.

Everything about the man is a mystery: The massive ranch in the remote Black Hills of Wyoming that nobody ever visits, the women who live with him, the secret philanthropies, the private airstrip, the sudden disappearances. And especially the persistent rumors that the man’s wealth comes from killing people. 

Stone Cold 
by C.J. Box
Read by David Chandler, 10h 49m
Rating A / Western Thriller 
(#14 in Joe Pickett Series)

Joe Pickett, still officially a game warden but now mostly a troubleshooter for the governor, is assigned to find out what the truth is, but he discovers a lot more than he’d bargained for. There are two other men living up at that ranch. One is a stone-cold killer who takes an instant dislike to Joe. The other is new – but Joe knows him all too well. The first man doesn’t frighten Joe. The second is another story entirely.

I’m still recovering so I missed parts of this book. It’s as good as ever though, and with a serious twist at the end.  

Just last night I finished the very recently released memoir “Remember, you are a Wiley,” by Maya Wiley which just got on to the booksellers’ Recent Release shelves on 9/17 – lol.  E-books and audio books are so cool for getting books while they’re still “hot,” immediately timely.  (I like that) 

Remember You’re a Wiley: A Memoir 
by Maya Wiley, September 2024
Read by author – 10h 45m
Rating – 8.75 / memoir

Maya Wiley,  for those of you who don’t know, is an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. She is a fairly regular commentator for MSNBC. She ran for mayor of New York City back in 2010 but was beaten in the primary. 

The book goes through her private life from way before she was born (it has a direct bearing on her struggles and on who she is today) including the sudden death of her (brilliant) Black lawyer and Civil Rights activist father,  George Wiley in a boating accident when Maya was 9 and her brother 11. They were with him, but unable to save him.  . Wiley’s mother was White and quite progressive. but had stayed home to raise their children. She was active active after her husband’s death. 

I’d always thought of Wiley as being from a really upscale elite family and circle,  chic clothes and friends, top notch schools, and entry into employment via family name or acquaintances. That might not be correct at all, although she did have resources and her well-known father likely provided for his family. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the book although it wasn’t anything special on the memoir shelf. I don’t think there were any ghost writers involved.

After finishing Ai Weiwei: a Memoir,  https://mybecky.blog/2024/09/14/ive-read-a-few-books-in-the-last-week-or-two/ I wanted to know more about China’s 20th Century history so seeing  the book Mao’s Great Famine on sale at Audible I just got it, only knowing a few tidbits, but nothing documented.  This book provided more than enough hard history (as hard as Chinese history ever gets anyway). There are more archives available although whether these are accurate is always an issue.   

Mao’s Great Famine:
The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958- 1962
by Frank Dikotter, 2010 
Read by Daniel York Loh  15h 43m 
Rating:  9.5 / academic-ish history 
(Volume 1 of 2) 

First came the Chinese Revolution fomenting from about 1920 with Mao almost literally at its head to lead the way. Then came the consolidation and conflict.

The West had some information due to it trickling out of China regarding the hi-lights of 1920, 1949, and 1957, when the Great Famine started, there wasn’t much and a lot of it was wrong. The real number of people killed during the Great Famine of 1958-1962 may never be known but is probably somewhere between 30 and 50 million people. This is a LOT of people slaughtered for pride, really.  Letters and reports, etc. have been found as primary source material, but few people are under any illusion that these are the entire story or terribly accurate. The information includes lies, exaggeration because it was originally written up for political purposes, to impress the world, to push Mao’s supporters,  to stay in the Chairman’s favor.

https://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle-of-chinas-great-famine

Frank Dikotter, the author, is a noted Dutch historian with over a dozen academic books re 20th Century China under his belt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Dik%C3%B6tter

This book is first in his series, “The People’s Trilogy” which goes “Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958- 1962,” then “The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957,”  and finally, “The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976.”   I don’t know if I can read them all.  I’m curious and they are so good, all prize-winners,, in part because of Weiwei’s memoir https://mybecky.blog/2024/09/14/ive-read-a-few-books-in-the-last-week-or-two/  – my very brief review on this site,but there are so many books on my nightstand (my Wish List).   – http://www.frankdikotter.com/

So the story –  in October of 1949, Mao came out of the mountains with his peasant army, picked up the old abandoned WWII Japanese weapons and formally proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. It then took many bloody years for the opposition forces including Chiang Kai-shek to leave him to it.  The end of that period is when Book 1, The Great Famine, takes up.  

In Book 2 of the series,  “The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957,”  Dikotter catches up by focusing on the earlier years, 1949 (or 1911 if you want to go way back) through 1958. This is the book which relies more on the newly opened archives. 

Mao wanted China to be able to compete with the US and England in production in strength and reputation.  He pushed with the tricks of the industrial revolution on one side and increased agriculture production on the other. China was to be up-and-running pronto – like Stalin had done with Russia. This cost a tremendous amount in lives as well as in money. The people starved and got worked to death. The “managers” lied to their bosses, the bosses lied to their own bosses and they in tern lied to Mao who just kept it going.  If anyone found out about the lies they were severely punished, so no one was squealing if they could help it.  

Then there came a small opposition group which quietly worked to take the reins from Mao. That coup failed in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and Mao came down hard on the offending forces.  In fact, the Cultural Revolution was a reaction on the part of Mao to fight his opposition. It worked but China is not necessarily better for it.  

There is so much good data in this book but it’s a rather academic tome – not for the general public. I id manage to get a lot out of it but I’m afraid I missed a lot, too.

Mao’s great Famine 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao%27s_Great_Famine

Great Chinese Famine:  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

National Library of Medicine: 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

Back in January of 1958 Charles Starkweather, age 19, and his girlfriend, Carol Ann Fugate, age 14,  went on what was called a “killing spree,” an 18-day rampage of killing taking them through Nebraska and Wyoming. I vaguely remember the horrific news articles of the times; I was 11 years old.

Starkweather
by Harry N. MacLean –  2017
Read by William DeMerritt 13h 15m
Rating: 8.25 / true crime 

Many books and films dealing with these events have been released since then, but this book, published in 2017 by Harry L. MacLean, has its own sensibilities.  It’s so full – it reminds me quite a lot of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,  very realistic, grim, and there are others like it. It has a strong western atmosphere but the reader knows this is no fantasy – even the fantasy of teens on a binge. 

And this is different from your usual “true crime” book, too. Rather than present a standard tension builder with a new investigation of the newspaper reports and court documents and evidence, MacLean has chosen to provide the reader with a challenge: was she or was she not guilty as charged or were there “circumstances not fully understood or appreciated at the time? And there’s a certain melancholy involved.

Personally,  I thought it was long with a lot of digression into background on various details, legalities and psychology. I was sometimes a wee bit dizzy from it but if you’re interested it’s definitely worth the read.  

Cleaver Magazine review –

I’ve read a few books in the last week or two and haven’t been able to get them blogged.  I’ve been in the hospital for the past week and very ill at home the week before that.  I was reading but not writing much.  I’m much better now –

1 Worst Case Scenario
by T.J. Newman 2024

I thought this looked interesting for quite a while – similar to The Martian or Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir but not quite.  Not as good, that’s for sure. In the today’s world the pilot of a large jet has a heart attack while at high altitude. The aircraft crashes into a nuclear power plant but doesn’t quite create a nuclear disaster.  Oh shades of Chernobyl, or Fukushima – yes.  This is not a climate book but rather a disaster book – Rating –  B- / thriller 

2 Murder on Waverly Place
by Victoria Thompson, 2012
#12 in series
This series keeps getting better. The relationship between Sarah and Frank stays low key while here there is a good who-done-it involving a seance scam. True to the era and very satisfying.  Rating – A / historical mystery 

3 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir 
by Ai Waiwai 2021

Ai Waiwai is an extremely famous Chinese artist and activist born in 1959, 10 years after the Chinese Revolution, to Ai Qing, his activist father who later spent much of his time in exile.  Ai Qing and Ai Weiwei both supported democracy and freedom in addition to human rights. His art is world famous.  He was able to leave China (rather than stay in exile) and travel for the study of art in the US and Europe, becoming widely considered to be the world’s most popular Chinese artist. He lived through a lot of history which was one of his passions and this is an excellent memoir combing what he was seeing in his own life to what was happening in China and the world.  This is a very sensitive man – concerned with history and the essence of humanity.     I might be reading Mao’s Great Famine next. This occurred between 1958 and 1963, directly after Weiwei was born so it’s definitely relevant to him and his father.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei

Well this was fun! I guess I needed a bit of a modern western shoot-em-up set in the Wyoming mountains with good guys and bad guys and some very deep resentments.  

Breaking Point
by C.J. Box, 2013
Read by David Chandler 10h 37m
Rating;   
#13 in the Joe Pickett series – 

I like the way C.J. Box draws our hero, Joe Pickett Game Warden, with an almost (not quite)  defiant attitude toward the usual authorities.  He’s not quite as angry as John Corey of Nelson Demille’s . He’s not even like Harry Bosch whose testosterone only takes him as far as doing things his own way when he really does NOT like the ways of his bosses.  Joe Pickett is a bit discerning trying to think things out and if someone is going to get killed,  or if his family is at risk, he won’t hesitate to go against whomever is “bossing” him.

In this book Tim Singwald, Lenox Baker, and Kim Love, three EPA enforcement officers, are hunting an apparently convicted felon so they can serve him with a judicial order. Singwald and Baker are from the federal agency but Love is local. This is near Grand Tetons in Wyoming, but Singwald and Lenox soon go missing.  

That’s when Joe Pickett, the series hero/protagonist and a game warden for the state of Wyoming, enters the story.  I very much enjoy the setting of Wyoming and the people we meet there. I suppose it’s educational when it gets to the politics Box almost touches on.  I love Joe’s family and have gotten to know them over the course of a dozen books plus (with about 12 left in the series). 

And his newish friend Butch Robinson disappeared into the forest a couple days ago so there is some concern there.  Butch’s daughter is best friends with Joe’s daughter, Lucy.  

One thing I like about these novels is the difference between city folks (Cheyenne or larger) and rural folks is somewhat emphasized. They sometimes have their own ideas about the natural resources, taxes, guns, building and hunting regulations, and so on.  Sometimes I get a wee bit leery about the politics – not of Joe’s so much as those of some of the others.   It seems the protagonists have excellent “family values”  (not the religious kind) although they sometimes agree with the less friendly neighbors.  This family and their ideas assures that the series is nicely saved. 

This time Joe is confronted by a new boss who has her own ideas and seems to want to keep the somewhat free-wheeling Joe on a leash. She’s not amused by a few of his methods – she wants him to remember whom he’s working for. 

Meanwhile, in the background overshadowing all of it, there seems to be a big scam going on, at least according to  Butch’s wife who says the EPA is on the hunt (with guns).

Well – it’s a thriller – 

This incredible work by Eric Larson is, like his others, a history book.  He carefully documents everything he finds – particularly any quotes but like others in this field he makes it all come to life by occasionally putting quotes from diaries into conversations. He uses all the sources he can including from newspaper articles, personal interviews, books, as well as journals and there are many diaries, journals, and letters quoted in his books.  

The Splendid and the Vile:
A Saga of Churchill. Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
Eric Larson, 2020
Read by John Lee 17h 49m 
Rating –  9.25 / history of Churchill and his family during WWII 

I really didn’t think I’d be interested although I enjoy Larson and have read 3 or 4 (Isaac’s Storm, In the Garden of Beasts, The Devil in the White City and others. But WWII and Churchill have never appealed to me.  Still,  I thought I “should” read it.  Okay fine.  IT went on sale and I snatched it up – waited a couple months and when I was between books started in.  

It’s thorough, I’ll say that, and sometimes it got bogged down in the details. But then I’d find myself really following one character or thread with great interest.  Okay – cool.  And toward the middle of the book I was reading and rereading to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.  

Actually,  I saved this in an Audible category I’d never made use of –  “Favorites” and it’s for books which need rereading so should I find myself stuck between books (as I often do) I’ll have something to fall back on. 🙂

Larson’s genius comes in developing the settings and characters in works of nonfiction well enough it reads like quality fiction except you know it’s not because there are all those source notes and you can check out many things online these days (and he could find them that way, too).  

I’ve been interested in reading some kind of True Crime book about the Alex Murdaugh murder case, but I was a bit afraid it had all been told on the TV coverage. But an actual book hadn’t crossed my path until the last few days when I found several of them.  I picked what looked like the best of the bunch and went with it.  

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and
the Fall of a Southern Dynasty
By: Valerie Bauerlein
Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed, Valerie Bauerlein 14h 53m
Rating:  8.5 / True Crime 

I made a good pick with this one. I think the author assumes if you’re reading the book you probably followed the crime story of a couple years ago. Huge headlines for money’d murders – a good writer putting together a volume of background and procedure along with rumor and as the subtitle says, the end of a Southern dynasty.  

I watched the news as it unrolled and I had no idea there was this much more to it. Bauerlein did an excellent job of following and developing the leads she thought worthwhile and I don’t feel like I missed anything.    

The first pages deal with the final days of the murder trial itself and then in Part 2 the story goes back to the a bit of the days of the family patriarch who had a son who had a son and the “dynasty,”  It was not quite what he seemed.  It goes on from there to the present day when Alex Murdoch, in the 4th lawyerly generation,  is reaping the results of having lived a life as (to me anyway) an apparent sociopath and dug himself a grave in the dirt of debt and deceit. 

The book is interesting in the way that family and small town tangles get convoluted especially when there’s a lot of money involved and emotions and rumors run high.  It’s an excellent example True Crime fiction circa mid-2020s when as long as the author tells it like it happened, the only rule is “no making things up.”  (Leaving things out is always problematical in nonfiction.

The narrator is excellent and adds to the experience. 

Medicine has always been something of a difficult mess with all those many parts doing so many different things. And then practitioners adding their actions.

 Out of all of them only one is they are dying which affects people generally, from the highest echelon doctors to the lowliest patients.  Doctors are trained in how to keep patients alive and with all the new technology, they can certainly do that for periods during which time more and more surgeries and procedures and medicines are used hoping to make a big difference – but they’ll really make only a 10% difference.  At a given minimum, the bottom line purpose for hospitals is to keep patients alive. 

‘

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
2014 / 282 pages
read by Robert Patoff  9h 3m
rating:  9 / nonfiction (health – medicine)
(read and listened)

Dr Gawande is a medical doctor interested in how people die and what, in the final days, is most important to them.  

I read this book back in 2015 I believe.  The group has chosen to read it again – some folks weren’t with us then and others could simply use a refresher.  I’m in the latter category –  now I’m wanting to reread it as a little kind of guide to how I should grow older.  

When this book first appeared my mom was 91 years old and as independent as she had ever been. She’d moved from her old home in the Sierra Nevadas to a senior park in a nearby small town where she knew many people and had activities.  The truth is that my siblings and I had moved her; we’d insisted she sell the house and move closer to town for driving and health. I think she was being unreasonable.  But she drove into town almost every day for card games or church or shopping. Her car was older.  

I thought I was doing okay as a caregiver but she had NOT wanted to move to town.  I’m not proud of how I helped her and my family, but I’m certainly not ashamed in any way. There’s a good sense of peace.

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.