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A Thousand Farewells (2012)

by Nahlah Ayed(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0670069094 (ISBN13: 9780670069095)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Viking Canada

review 1: A selection of my "international fiction" book club. Nahlah had a shocking turn of events in childhood. She was born in Canada to Palestinian parents. When she was 6 years old, her parents worried that their kids would become too Westernized. So they uprooted and moved back to a refugee camp in Jordan where they remained for the next 7 years! There was no work, so eventually her dad returned to Canada without the family and sent money back for their living expenses! They eventually reunited and stayed in Canada, where Nahlah studied journalism and became the Middle East correspondent for CBC television news. I was transfixed by her growing up story. The rest of the book describes her 10 years covering conflicts in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. I ... morelearned a lot about the history of the conflicts in that area of the world, but I found the book slow going and would literally only read about 5 pages at a time before wandering off. I was also a bit vexed that she said zero about her personal life during those years, leading us to believe she had no personal life and was "all business." The contrast between her childhood "tell all" and her later silence about personal matters was too great. I thought about whether I would have different expectations of a male journalist's story and the answer is no.
review 2: I found this book both fascinating and frustrating, as well as informative. Ayed was born in Canada to parents who had grown up in Middle Eastern refuge camps. When Ayed and her siblings were very young their parents decided to leave their comfortable and settled existence in Winnipeg to return to the Middle East where they lived, again, in a refuge camp. Ayed describes the struggles of that life with the skill of a trained journalist and the added insight of writer who has lived the experience. Then the book skips ahead to Ayed's adult life as a CBC journalist covering the Middle East's various war zones. This is where I found the book became frustrating. Although she had the ability to cover those wars from the powerful perspective of somebody who understands what people are going through in a way that few other journalists could, she chose not to. I wanted to hear more about how she was affected by, for example, the bombings of her neighbourhood or the attack of an angry mob. I wanted that insight not so much to hear her story exclusively but to gain her understanding of what these events meant to the people going through them. What is it like to love your country but hate your government to the point of uprising, to have friends and neighbours who suddenly turn on you because of your religion, to be shot at because the religious texts you read carry a description of events that varies slightly from those of other texts? I wanted to get inside the heads of the people living in the areas Ayad was covering for the CBC and felt she could have offered that. less

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