A review by guiltyfeat
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman

3.0

Predictably uneven collection of essays. I went to the Jerusalem book launch for this a few weeks ago and found myself in the audience at the Q&A yelling at Michael Chabon, one of my favourite authors and his wife. Not my finest hour. Now that I have read all the essays in this collection, I'm still a bit conflicted about the potential impact of this project. Saying that the Occupation is bad seems as redundant as saying that Trump's Presidency is bad. No one intelligent is going to argue with you. If anything some of the essays here are a little too even-handed because if the soldiers who maintain the occupation are partly victims too, then what exactly are the authors confronting? There's also a fair amount of repetition which I guess is to be expected given that some of these writers traveled together, but there are also some gems here including Assaf Gavron's piece about football and Colum McCann moving story about Combatants for peace. I went into this concerned that it might be a fruitless exercise and finished it finding it mostly toothless.