One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.
This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means - as a citizen, as a father - to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book -- NAOMI KLEIN Urgent, essential, and profound. A lightning bolt - sets fire to our comforting lies, and illuminates a way forwards -- RIZ AHMED A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book -- BRIAN ENO Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity's darkest chapters -- TEA OBREHT If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is - on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul - trying -- MAX PORTER One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out . . . It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: "When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?" -- DINA NAYERI * * The Guardian * * I am quite sure now that I will never be the same person again . . . May we all live long, but this book should be in our will and testament, so our children and our children's children receive the pen of Omar El Akkad. To read a book that perfectly extracts the feelings I have been having is a gift I never thought I would receive. This book has changed my life. It is a book of hope - because it shows us that damning testament of our past, but also a blueprint for the future. Read this book -- MISAN HARRIMAN Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This is . . . exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be . . . there is no mistaking the urgency of the questions he asks about the asymmetry of global power, the myopia of western journalism and the costs of not holding both to account. This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury -- ALEX CLARK * * Financial Times * * Omar El Akkad's book is the most urgent, the most important one I've read in years. A book that meets the needs of our time and speaks to the horrors inflicted upon the Palestinian people with a commensurate and necessary fire and fury. Written with a luminous precision of thought, it is revelatory, excoriating, and deeply personal. Get it, read it, lend or gift it . . . this exceptional book should be read by everyone, everywhere -- JULIET STEVENSON If we, as humans, are lucky enough, we will someday be ashamed of ourselves for what is happening in the world today before our eyes. Some of us can already see that day and are deeply disgusted by the collective hypocrisy that waits until it is safe to shout out the crimes. It is not easy to write or talk when you feel that disgust; it chokes you and breaks your faith in humanity. One can hear that all-too-human disgust in Omar El Akkad's words. However, what is more audible in his words is his determination to keep his faith in humans. Only those who can write with such rage and love will give a heart to a heartless world. His poetic voice, with its elegant power, can only come from those who are one with the world, with its joy and pain -- ECE TEMELKURAN Despite all the ugliness documented in these pages, there is a constant undercurrent that longs for a better world, a more just world, a world in which the current disgusting actions by Israel in Gaza might be called out for what they are, and stopped. Incredibly moving and powerful -- DOUG JOHNSTONE * * Big Issue * * This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world. -- RICHARD FLANAGAN Omar El Akkad's book is a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope -- RAJA SHEHADEH Each generation looks back in judgement, and sometimes in horror, at the moral blind spots of earlier generations and previous ages. To get a glimpse of how we in the early twenty-first century might one day be judged for our passivity and hypocrisy, I urge you to read Omar El Akkad's astonishing book -- DAVID OLUSOGA In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in this world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonised and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that 'cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it's a people's love for one another -- ISABELLA HAMMAD Is this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is.
Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is.
Is this the most eye-opening book right now? Yep.
Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely -- RABIH ALAMEDDINE I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now . . . it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn't anymore. Please read this. I promise you won't regret it. I honestly don't know how you could -- TOMMY ORANGE If this firm rejection of trying to talk to 'both sides' has the effect of limiting who the book speaks to, it may also stiffen the resolve of readers who come to it craving moral clarity. It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear -- ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD * * The Washington Post * * Strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the truest, most necessary book you will ever read -- JUNOT DIAZ One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love -- MEGHA MAJUMDAR An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad's moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West-the outraged and the apathetic alike -- DAN SHEEHAN Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel's unspeakable violence against the Palestinians -- MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI El Akkad's propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows -- NADIFA MOHAMED Brilliant . . . This book is a love story in the face of genocide - a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song -- LIDIA YUKNAVITCH I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives - I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so . . . but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience -- JEFF VANDERMEER Omar El Akkad's devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary -- DINAW MENGESTU Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book -- CHRISTINA SHARPE An aching, angry, poignant, articulate indictment (in the end) of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and how little the world (focus on the U.S.) has paid attention. There is so much to take in with this powerful reporting and analysis that it calls for in my mind several readings. It's a gut punch - deservedly so -- SHERYL COTLEUR * * Copperfield's * * In my life as a bookseller there have been only a handful of books that I feel are absolutely necessary. Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is one of those books. El Akkad's analysis and fury are articulated with such clarity that it stands as a beacon that will illuminate our path forward. I urge you to read this book and to find a place in your heart and in your bookstore for this book -- PAUL YAMAZAKI * * City Lights Booksellers * * In [One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad's] first nonfiction book, his narrative voice is measured and quietly engrossing in its articulation of what he sees as almost unspeakable, certainly ethically indefensible . . . The unsettling power of his writing on Gaza conveys the magnitude of what has happened there most powerfully in the accounts of individual deaths that punctuate his narrative, their cumulative effect amounting to a kind of haunting . . . Gaza, he concludes, has killed something in us all: the victims, the perpetrators, the western leaders who have enabled the slaughter, the cheerleaders and the helpless onlookers -- SEAN O'HAGAN * * The Observer * * A furious, intimate, profound articulation of the soul ache so many of us have been feeling every single day for the past fifteen months as we watch the Israel/US assault on Gaza unfold. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book I wish I could gift to everyone in America. I have honestly never recommended a work of nonfiction as strongly as I do this one. There is no doubt in my mind that it will become one of the essential texts of this unfathomably dark time. A painful but essential indictment of a broken world * * LitHub * * [A] fierce, anguished indictment of Western hypocritical indifference towards Israel's destruction of Gaza . . . Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony * * Booklist * * El Akkad . . . state[s] that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human . . . Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know . . . A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy * * Kirkus Reviews * * A powerful and deeply disturbing book . . . It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right. The genocide is happening before our eyes. We can speak out, or we can choose apathy and collusion. And condemn our souls -- LAWRENCE HILL * * The Globe & Mail * * A blazing and feral work of nonfiction * * The Portland Mercury * * A powerful moral indictment of the West's callousness and cruelty toward those who fall outside the realms of privilege and power * * Bookbrowse * * Hits you in the pit of the stomach from its very first pages . . . a moving, beautiful and necessary book . . . an amazing reading experience, a blending of personal and political. It is a book that presents us with a seemingly endless ledger of cruelty and atrocity, and asks us to face the contagion of violence fully. But in the end, he asks us to use that knowledge to keep believing in a better world, to have the courage to work toward it * * Daily Kos * * One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an angry, uncompromising book full of exasperated wisdom and virtue. Its honesty is invigorating -- ISLE McELROY * * Vulture * * Omar El Akkad has written a masterpiece, as gorgeous and devastating as the subject is heartbreaking. Part reflective memoir, part piercing essay, part cri de cour against liberal hypocrisy and indifference, it is, above all, an extraordinary piece of writing. It is also that rarest of things, a searing book on Palestine that is uncompromising in its moral force and clarity and yet does not strike a single strident note. I read it in a day and told all my friends they should run, not walk, to pick it up -- NATHAN THRALL, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama One Day is an angry, graphic, elegant, shocking howl of a book that, in the deafening silence that follows, makes you wonder: what now? * * New Statesman * * Despite all the ugliness documented in these pages, there is a constant undercurrent that longs for a better world, a more just world, a world in which the current disgusting actions by Israel in Gaza might be called out for what they are, and stopped. Incredibly moving and powerful -- DOUG JOHNSTONE * * The Big Issue * * I was struck by El Akkad's persistent and quiet bewilderment, which, as troubled and troubling as it is, is darkly hopeful in its precision and anguish, hopeful even in its despair, as it does the good work of unpacking the silent and insidious ways by which a society is made to stomach crimes done in its name and continue not seeing them as such. It is invested in the unravelling of propaganda. I was moved by the self-portrait the author draws within all of these tides of implication. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and brave account that refuses to lose its confidence in the possibility of things being different. -- HISHAM MATAR El Akkad's work is a vital reflection of the West to itself. The West is in the process of rupture, of decay from within, as its systems strip back everything from everyone but the richest . . . [One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This] has a startling coherence, and is written with the force of poetry -- ALEX HALL * * Morning Star * *
