oz617's reviews
463 reviews

Well, that was creepy. As it should be, really. Tinkerbell has died off-stage, and Peter has forgotten killing Captain Hook. "I forget them after I kill them". Peter very almost kills Wendy's daughter with a dagger, but chooses not to after realising *she* can be his mother now instead of Wendy. Wendy lets this happen, and is happy to, I suppose because as an adult now she can more easily see how lonely this whole thing is. Also cycles, you know. 

It's a bit overly expository, and doesn't add anything, but it's clearly not supposed to. This was written to be performed one time, as a gift to the actress who'd originally played Wendy. In that context, it's quite lovely. In as much as Peter Pan can be lovely. Freaks me out really.

 I was expecting to be debating and rolling my eyes at this quite a bit, after reading Segev's introduction about his enduring admiration for the first Israelis. I think that part might have been intentionally vague in order to let this book get published, because as the book continues, his condemnations of the very first settlers, the state of Israel's politicians, and of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine generally, very much ring out. Segev is scathing about Ben-Gurion especially, which is extremely refreshing after reading Benny Morris's account of the same events.

Impressively, it did leave me with a large amount of sympathy for the Israelis I think Segev was alluding to - the thousands of immigrants from the diaspora lured under false pretenses to a state that was in no way ready to take them. The Yemeni Jews forced to cut their sidelocks by the European immigrants who believed the Israeli culture must also be European, the Ethiopian Jews who were thrown out of their new houses by the IDF when the housing shortage became apparent, everyone who sent letters home saying Israel was not what they were promised it would be, only to have those letters confiscated and never received. 

There were a couple times I'd question the wording of something, mostly just when Segev quotes an account from the time then continues to use its questionable use of terms for that paragraph without presenting them in quotation marks (which would show they're now inaccurate at best), but it's extremely minor. Overall I thought it was the best Israeli perspective you could want, and I can see why the Institute for Palestine Studies republished it. 

Was willing to be charitable about Morris's intent on nuance up until the conclusion. Nauseating, the way he talks about Palestinians (and Arabs broadly), with this paternalistic tone, all while contradicting himself at every step. At one point he says Ben-Gurion was naively generous about Arab beliefs, blaming this on Ben-Gurion not having spoken Arabic, so Morris jumps in to tell us what Arabs actually believe. Except we know from the introduction that Morris does not speak Arab either, and acknowledges only Israeli archives as his sources. 

This was a useful read for me, despite it feeling like being thrown into cold water, partly as an exercise in critical thinking, partly as a test of knowledge of the screeds of Palestinian context Morris leaves out, and also just to see what's being said by a Zionist often considered moderate. To Morris's credit, he cites his sources well, and since the vast majority of them are quotes from prominent figures of the time this becomes a helpful collection of (extremely one sided) primary sources. 

4.5 stars for all the arguments within that fascinate me endlessly. There's a lot going on here politically, in a way that manages to reveal something about the author while also never feeling out of character (and the characters are so beautifully different). The ideas of world peace unushered by genocide ring true, I just wished they were a little more bolstered by theory from outside the Western progressive circuit. There's something quite 19th century at times - I kept thinking "even the savages deserve rights" whenever sympathetic yet wildly inaccurate mentions were made of Africa below the Nile basin, and for all the mentions of Palestine (which, low bar, but seeing Palestine talked about without Israel is still a lovely novelty), the idea of Islam as the religion of a war god was lingering around. And why does everyone accept that the world would be better and *stay* better if we killed (almost) all the men? Love that the protagonists all recognise that's undoable and wouldn't be justified anyway, but they all agree that there'd be no murder, no rape, and especially no war, if the world was 99% women? This is the 80s, just look at Britain for a second, please.

Anyway, fundamentally this is a character novel, and that does track for these characters. Most of them are, after all, ancient, and all of them are biased (and know this. Even Marius, after recent events). I love that the message boils down to "No one needs or deserves a God stepping in to solve their problems with deceptively simple solutions, just as the global North should learn to keep it's hands out of the global South", and the characters make the arguments I believe they would make to support or contest that. I would just kill for a character who'd read Franz Fanon.

I truly don't know why this is described as a thriller, or a mystery. It's neither. It's a complicated and realistic portrayal of survival of child abuse, and somehow seems to be marketed towards the exact kind of true crime fans the book frequently mocks. I appreciated how ordinary the evil was, how the book contains plenty of every day accomplices to the main abuse, how there's many reasons for why it was allowed to continue from many different points of view. I'll be thinking about this one for a while, I think.

Very post gulf war. I can't tell what parts of the aggressive patriotism are intended as satirical or insulting. Certainly it doesn't feel like the British government here or its services are more likeable than the - and I wish I was exaggerating - evil, fat, and ugly Middle Eastern villain who wants to kill all British children, and his disfigured accomplice. That said. See aforementioned villains.