There is a saying: only children and drunk people tell the truth. Deborah Ellis, who has written some insightful books about the war in Afghanistan (The Breadwinner, Parvana's Journey, and Mud City) based on interviews with Afghan women of various refugee camps, allows this truth to come to light on the pages of this short book. A very short book, indeed, but with huge impact!
In a set of interviews, Isreali and Palestinian children relate their peronal stories and thoughts on the war that is destroying their lives, tears their families apart, and burns hate and dispair into their innocent souls so deep it will take generations of care, love and forgiveness to heal. Assuming they ever have the chance to experience that care, love and forgiveness ever at all. The book, not for its literary execellence, but for its message is akin to Munch's Scream or Picasso's Guernica. None of these pieces of art is beautiful. None has been made with the artist's care for aesthetics. Rather, each expresses an extremely powerful message about the brutality and bestiality of war and about the utter human dispair in the face of such terror.
There is only one loud and crystal clear message from the stories both the Israeli and the Palestinian children relate. War alienates, drives people into dispair. It does not matter who started, when or why. What matters is that neither side is willing to stop, and it is their own future, their own children are the ones who suffer the most.
This book should be mandatory read in our schools!
"Writing isn't magic. I mean, hell, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Kids can do it. When they write down their stories, it means that people can read them 10 centuries from now and know who we were, and that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. What a blast! We can know what Plato and all those people were thinking back in those days, and generally they weren't thinking anything too terribly more interesting than what we're thinking now. We're thinking the same things and have the same questions", Ellis says in an interview with Dave Jenkinson for the Canadian Review of Materials of the University of Manitoba.
Proceeds from Deborah Ellis' books are donated to charities.
In a set of interviews, Isreali and Palestinian children relate their peronal stories and thoughts on the war that is destroying their lives, tears their families apart, and burns hate and dispair into their innocent souls so deep it will take generations of care, love and forgiveness to heal. Assuming they ever have the chance to experience that care, love and forgiveness ever at all. The book, not for its literary execellence, but for its message is akin to Munch's Scream or Picasso's Guernica. None of these pieces of art is beautiful. None has been made with the artist's care for aesthetics. Rather, each expresses an extremely powerful message about the brutality and bestiality of war and about the utter human dispair in the face of such terror.
There is only one loud and crystal clear message from the stories both the Israeli and the Palestinian children relate. War alienates, drives people into dispair. It does not matter who started, when or why. What matters is that neither side is willing to stop, and it is their own future, their own children are the ones who suffer the most.
This book should be mandatory read in our schools!
"Writing isn't magic. I mean, hell, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Kids can do it. When they write down their stories, it means that people can read them 10 centuries from now and know who we were, and that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. What a blast! We can know what Plato and all those people were thinking back in those days, and generally they weren't thinking anything too terribly more interesting than what we're thinking now. We're thinking the same things and have the same questions", Ellis says in an interview with Dave Jenkinson for the Canadian Review of Materials of the University of Manitoba.
Proceeds from Deborah Ellis' books are donated to charities.
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