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A day in the life of Abed Salama anatomy of a Jerusalem tragedy

"Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos--the children have been taken to...

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Main Author: Thrall, Nathan (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York, New York : Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2023.
Edition: First edition.
Subjects:
Salama, Abed.
Jewish-Arab relations.
Palestinian Arabs > Israel > Social conditions.
Parental grief > Israel.
Arab-Israeli conflict > 1993-
Jerusalem > Social conditions.
Summary: "Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos--the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth"--
Physical Description: xiii, 255 pages : maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages 220-242) and index.
ISBN: 9781250854971
1250854970
Author Notes: Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama . He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine . His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , the Guardian , London Review of Books , and the New York Review of Books and been translated into more than twenty languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Jerusalem.

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