Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War

Delphine Minoui's The Book Collectors is a short, digestible, compelling text about a group of men who assemble an underground library in the town of Daraya, during the Syrian Civil War. Minoui discovers the secret library on social media and is able to get in contact with a founding member, who introduces her to other resisters. Working through shoddy video feeds and technological blackouts, Minoui struggles to keep in contact with the rebels--to learn what stories mean the most to them and to voice their desperation to the rest of the world.

This book is simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking, exploring both the essential hopeful importance of art and the crushing inhumanity of war at the same time. Most of the library's founders and patrons weren't big readers before the uprising, but they discover that reading gives them the same passionate feeling as protest--a force for both vital education and transformative self-care escape. These guys are fighting to save the intellectual history of Daraya, while the town's walls are literally falling around them. Suffice it to say, they don't all make it, but their story lives on in this book--just like all the writing they fought so hard to save can never really be destroyed.

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