From Library Journal
The author, now teaching English at South African University, spent 1988-90 doing human rights work on the West Bank, where she became involved with the plight of Mohammad Abu Aker, a Palestinian teenager from a refugee camp who was critically injured by Israeli soldiers during a stone-throwing incident. Mohammad was a living martyr of the Intifada until his death in 1990. Arranging for his medical care was Gunn's responsibility; however, her relationship with him, his family, and other camp residents developed into much more as she began to understand the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their will to survive. Even if this were only another human interest story, it would be worthwhile for its well-written documentation of life in a Palestinian refugee camp. But this book is more than that; it is simultaneously a biography of Mohammad and an autobiography of Gunn, who had left the United States, her academic career, and her marriage to rediscover and redefine herself on the West Bank. Gunn does a good job of interweaving the two genres. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.?Ruth K. Baacke, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Sys., Bellingham, Wash.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Daily life in a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank is described by an American human rights worker who was there from 1988 to 1990. Gunn focuses her story on a teenager, Mohammad Abu Aker, who was critically shot during a stone-throwing demonstration, became a living martyr of the Intifada uprising, and died in 1990. She tells of arrests, land confiscations, home invasions, beatings, shootings--yet always she finds that the people's strongest weapon against the Israeli occupation lies in their holding on to the mundane details of daily life. Unfortunately, Gunn keeps reminding us that she's just an American outsider and that she can't be objective. She intrudes on every page with banal and boring parallels about her own personal loss. This may satisfy trendy academic requirements about what she calls "the problematics of positionality," but it's the Palestinians we want to know about. Gunn is most compelling when she tells of ordinary people who, despite their suffering, have a vitality and an indomitable spirit that help them carry on. Hazel Rochman
About the Author
Janet Varner Gunn is teaching in the Department of English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, after completing a Senior Fulbright Lectureship.
