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41: Inside the Presidency of George H. W. Bush. By Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry, eds.

and the choices made to remain on the land expose a general sense of the interviewees’ anxiety. The narrators reveal not only daily nuisances but also how frustration can turn into retaliation. One man who has since become a lawyer for Palestinian prisoners is an example of how this escalation occurs. He shared how, as children in a refugee camp, he and others responded to the taunting of soldiers and settlers by throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags, and then in their teens transitioned to making homemade explosives. Arrested, he suffered through months of torturous interrogation and then spent the next five years in prison. About his release he says, “I was still only twenty, but I was more influential in our society because people respect someone who’s been in jail—we weren’t seen as criminals, but leaders” (88). Just six months later he was taken back into custody without charges, resulting in a pattern of arrests that led to a combined total of seventeen years in prison. He was a leader out of jail and a leader in jail, and his story and others show how incarceration for being a political dissenter becomes a badge of honor. The book successfully exposes a sense of unity that a geographically divided people share as well as their commitments to Palestinian life and land, offering narratives that other scholars and writers can draw upon as they seek to reveal the people of Palestine and their experience of a military occupation that spans generations. A strength of the book, however, also becomes a weakness, in that the novelistic detail so effectively conveys the narrators’ trauma that it undermines the editors’ stated goal of revealing a Palestine that is not locked in the hopelessness of an “intractable conflict” (18). The narrators themselves focus on their ongoing frustration and despair and not on a foreseeable peace. The book makes a significant contribution in humanizing the conflict and revealing the toll this crisis has taken on the Palestinian people. I would recommend this work for college classes or readers interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as for college classes in oral history.